Alix, in fact, said nothing of the sort: she liked the house, of course – who wouldn’t – but was principally surprised Liz managed to keep the garden in such good order. How ever did she find the time? Did she have secret gardeners in her pay?
Menopause Mansions. Liz, putting glasses and an ice bucket on a tray in the front room, in preparation for Stephen’s arrival (or was it warm enough to have drinks in the garden? She hesitated), gazed across at this offending block, which reminded her occasionally that she had herself as yet suffered no hints of an approaching change of life. Since she had given up sex and contraception, her bodily existence had been of an exemplary calm and regularity. Odd to think of, almost impossible to remember, the tormenting anxieties of those earlier decades: whether one was or was not pregnant, whether one had thrush or trichomoniasis (Charles had passed on a very nasty dose of this and had made himself ill by insisting on drinking alcohol all the way through the prescribed ten days of pills), whether or not one was bleeding irregularly, whether the contraceptive pill was masking real illnesses, whether or not one’s partner was losing interest, was too interested, was inadequate, was faithless. Tempestuous times. So much anxiety, about one’s reproductive system. Abscesses, infections, lumps, sores, effusions, discharges.
Surely, thought Liz (deciding they could after all have drinks in the garden, picking up the tray, opening the door with her foot), surely it is time for some more little disturbances? Hot flushes, for example? This is an unnatural calm.
Her tabby cat followed her into the garden, and leaped with a muffled little cry, a small squeak of pleasure, on to the warm wood of the garden table, and began to weave backwards and forwards, rubbing herself against Liz’s arm, against the ice bucket, and (rather unsuccessfully) against the unstable water jug. ‘Silly,’ said Liz fondly. She was extremely attached to her cat, and much amused by her own attachment. She felt about the cat rather as she had once felt about her children – that they were without doubt the prettiest, the most intelligent, the most endearing children in the world, and that she was without doubt a fool to think them so, but a wise fool, wisely foolish. The strange little flicker of reflected, perpetuated emotion which hovered around the tabby cat like a striped halo amused her. It seemed a harmless, innocent indulgence, to be fond of one’s cat. An affectation, but a harmless affectation. The cat purred, loudly, cheerfully, companionably. Liz sometimes dreamed that her cat could talk: after one such dream, in which the cat had said, when Liz expressed surprise at its new-found power, that it had always been able to talk, of course, but simply hadn’t chosen to, Liz had woken herself up with her own laughter. Laughing, to herself, alone, in the dark.
She smiled, now, remembering this, and gently knocked the cat’s nose out of the water jug. The colours of the garden deepened in the evening light: a scent of rose and nicotiana and honeysuckle mingled. The table and the garden chairs stood on a little paved terrace: beyond it stretched a small lawn, and, set in the lawn, unexpectedly perhaps, a small square pond, surrounded by bluish paving stones, flat bluish-yellowish-grey paving stones. The pond was divided into four small squares by two symmetrical paths of stone: one could walk into the middle of the pond and stand, as though in the middle of a chess board, at the crossroads of a watery game. The design, though of the greatest simplicity, was peculiarly pleasing: few guests resisted the temptation to walk in the middle of the water. Stephen Cox, upon arrival, made his way there almost at once, with a glass of deep-yellow Portuguese wine in his hand, and stood gazing down into the shallows, where a few small silver fish swam. Liz, lying back with her feet up on one of the cane chairs, her cat on her knee, watched him. A blackbird sang, and a robin perched on an urn. Irises grew in the pond: the flat blades of their blue-green leaves, the intimately shaded blues and greys and mauves of the spikes of flowers, blended with the colours of the lichen-encrusted flat slabs of stone, suggesting antiquity, eternity, eternal harmony, a strange shivering fusion of light and shade and form. Stephen stood in the centre, and looked back at Liz, and smiled.
Returning to his chair, he reclined, and sipped his wine. ‘I prefer your pond to the ponds of Japan,’ he said. ‘I prefer your flat little bridges.’
‘But they were beautiful, those Japanese ponds, those little willow pattern bridges,’ said Liz. ‘Didn’t you think?’
And they embarked, as they had planned, upon their Japanese conversation: the difficulties, the enigmas, the linguistic obscurities, the disorientations, the cultural impregnability of Japan; the silk parcels, the screens, the wrappings-up, the slicing, the patternings; the delicacies, the crudities of Japan. Stephen had accustomed himself to the raw fish better than Liz, on her visit, had done, but he confessed that one night he had escaped his host’s attention and slipped off into the night of Nara to purchase himself a hamburger and chips. He spoke also of an evening in a restaurant when he had politely and whimsically enquired (having eaten jelly fish, chrysanthemum leaves, strange microscopically thin sections of unknown forms of radish, sea urchin, tiny floating large-eyed spawn) about the edibility of the floral decoration on the table: to his alarm, one of his companions had reached forward with, his chopsticks and had, whimsically, elegantly, fastidiously, without comment, extracted blossom after blossom and munched and crunched them up.
‘But what kind of flowers were they?’ asked Liz.
‘Oh, quite a variety,’ said Stephen, ‘chrysanthemums, carnations, anemones . . . quite a selection.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’ But, almost, she did. Liz herself had been at her wits’ end in Japan, although she would not disclose this, even to Stephen: the memory of it alarmed her still, which is one of the reasons why she found it pleasant to speak of Japan to Stephen, domesticating a past terror. Indoors, they went, still speaking, to their iced soup and fish salad: they spoke of Yukio Mishima and his stammering hero (stammer for homosexuality?), of Somerset Maugham and his club-footed hero (club foot for stammer-plus-homosexuality?), and of other such transpositions, as they gazed through the dining-room window at the darkening sky and the by now deep, deep blue-purple shades of the little pond. The light play of reason and discourse, over the terrors of the unknowable, the unknown. So lightly spoke Stephen, so lucidly, so gently: a thin, clear, rational, feeling man. Or so he seemed, or so he wished to seem. A man with no harm in him, or a man who had as cunningly as a serpent evaded his own powers of doing ill: at the high price of loneliness, Liz sometimes wondered. Was he ever at his wits’ end? Who could say?
Stephen described a strange encounter, in a hotel in Osaka. Dining alone there, in the panoramic Western restaurant on the twentieth floor of an exceedingly luxurious, modern hotel, happy with his book and his well-done steak and his bottle of claret and night view of bright lights, glad to be alone for an evening, glad to be spared for a while the trial of smiling and the uncertainty of the significance of his smiling, his attention was suddenly snatched from the history of Lon Nol and the rise of Pol Pot by a mild commotion: an elderly American guest, risen to his feet in some agitation, was pointing at the floor and at the huge, cloth-skirted, central, colourful, help-yourself, abundant Swedish-style buffet table that ran down the centre of the room, and Stephen was just in time to catch sight of the disappearing hindquarters of an enormous grey rat, whisking away under the table-cloth.
‘A rat, a rat!’ exclaimed the elderly American, not quite à haute voix: more in a muffled anguish of disbelieving protest: waiters had gathered, claiming not to comprehend, wisely not repeating the offending syllable, quietly, firmly, collectively forcing the gentleman back to his seat, where he collapsed, with his bottle of beer, muttering still to himself, ‘But I saw a rat, I saw a rat.’
Stephen had gazed round the assembled diners, to see how they responded, to see if any others, like himself, had been well placed enough to see the rat (a rat? On the twentieth floor?): but wisely, they too were pretending to have seen nothing, to have noticed nothing – all, that is, sa
ve another solitary and elderly gentleman whom Stephen, to his quickly tempered astonishment, recognized as his one-time tutor from Oxford, the eighty-year-old historian, then plain Sir Willian Hestercombe, now Lord Filey of Foley. Lord Filey – red nosed, silver haired, elegantly dressed, diminutive, was watching the subsiding of the ripple of excitement with interest above the top of his half reading glasses, his copy of Paul Hargreaves’s flamboyantly entitled The Resurgence of the Right momentarily laid to rest on his empty plate. He had clearly already noted Stephen’s presence: he saluted him with a modest wave, as soon as Stephen registered his identity. ‘I had the uneasy feeling,’ said Stephen, ‘that he’d been watching me all evening. Me and the rat.’ A moment of hesitation had followed: then Lord Filey had indicated, in dumb show, from some three tables away, that when Stephen had finished his steak, he would be welcome to join his ex-tutor over coffee. Stephen, humbly, had nodded his consent: and then, munching rather more rapidly than he would have wished, and washing down his claret more carelessly, he had reflected on the recent eccentricities of Lord Filey, which might well be about to let him in for an odd half-hour. Lord Filey, he reminded Liz, who only dimly recalled the furore, had insisted during the Falklands War, on returning his honorary degree to the Argentinian University of San Lazaro, and on returning it with maximum publicity, letters to the press, interviews, and varied diatribes against a startling range of offenders, including the Post Office, which had charged him £8.59 postage and refused to guarantee prompt delivery of his degree because of the hostilities. His diatribes had in turn made him the target of much violent abuse from fellow-academics protesting on behalf of the international community of scholarship, the free exchange of ideas, the mutual respect and dignity of independent men of letters: Filey had responded with some scandalous tales about skulduggery and tenure-rigging in the history department of San Lazaro: others had hit back with allegations about unsavoury proceedings in Filey’s own college in 1952: and so it had continued, to the amusement of some, to the distress of others, and to the momentary confusion of Stephen Cox as he sat savouring his last glass of claret, wondering how to approach the old boy, and whether it would be necessary to speak of the Falklands and Argentina. But the old boy had made it very easy: with a charming smile, removing his glasses, calling for coffee, he had waved Stephen to a seat, and had opened with the information that he was here in Osaka to collect an Honorary Degree from a small independent women’s college – small fry, small fry, but a very handsome piece of packaging, and it keeps up the score after that small mistake with the Argentine, to which, if you please, we will not refer. So they did not refer: they spoke, briefly, of the rat: ‘a great whiskered chap, a real grandad’, said Filey, with glee: of the hundreds of neatly uniformed, charming, diminutive, uniform girls who had lined up to watch his degree ceremony; of Yukio Mishima and Angus Wilson and Edmund Blunden; of raw fish and chrysanthemums; of Stephen’s novel, newly translated into Japanese.
‘And then,’ said Stephen, ‘I went back to my bedroom, and thought about the rat. Twenty floors up. And you know what those hotel bedrooms are like – so spotlessly clean, so hygienic, everything so well laundered, the towels, the toothpaste, the slippers, the kimono laid out – and a rat? In a way, I rather admired that rat.’
‘I think I’d have found a rat quite friendly in Japan,’ said Liz. ‘I’ve never felt so – ’ (she rejected the word lonely) ‘ – so isolated in my life.’
‘And now,’ said Stephen, ‘you have a little cat. She’s nicer than a rat, really.’
The cat purred, proudly, when mentioned: she was sitting, as usual, on Liz’s knee.
A little silence fell, as Stephen and Liz, separately and knowingly, considered the nature of solitude. Would anything be said? Probably not. And it was not, for at that moment the telephone rang: it was Stella, from Cambridge, wanting, for some reason, the address of Deirdre Kavanagh. Deirdre Kavanagh had, mercifully, vanished from Liz’s life: she hoped Stella was not about to reintroduce her, Stephen had never met the colourful, red-haired pastry-making Deirdre: Liz described her, then was persuaded to move on to an account of the state of play with her various offspring and step-offspring – ‘so many of them it takes so long,’ she deprecated, as she ran down the list. Jonathan, somewhat in his father’s footsteps, working for Anglia Television, Aaron on the dole writing a play, Alan, academic and conscientious and political in Manchester, Sally running wild and witless for six months in India, Stella, semi-wild and semi-studious reading Modern Languages at Cambridge: Jonathan, she thought, might be getting married. She hoped so. A grandchild, she said, would be welcome. ‘I wouldn’t like to think,’ she said, ‘that being brought up in so large a family had put any of them off having children of their own. But that, I suppose,’ she said, ‘is a most selfish thought.’
Stephen said that Alix had said to him that she hoped Ilse and Nicholas would have a baby. ‘A baby?’ said Liz, ‘what could they need a baby for? They’ve got one of my cat’s kittens.’
The cat purred fiercely, in agreement, and put up her paw to Liz’s breast.
And Stephen went on to speak of Alix and Brian. Like Otto, Stephen was anxious about Brian. Brian, his oldest friend, seemed to have struck a bad patch.
‘It’s politics,’ said Liz.
‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘In a word, politics. Did you hear he was on strike? That most of the staff at the college are on strike?’
‘I thought the college was closing.’
‘It is. That’s why they’re on strike.’
‘That’s grim,’ said Liz.
‘Yes,’ said Stephen, ‘it is.’
‘What would you do, Stephen?’ asked Liz, tilting her chair back, putting her knees precariously against the circular table, stroking the cat, putting her head quizzically on one side. ‘What would you do, if you were in charge of this wretched country? I always think you know the answer to these things. What would you do?’
‘Ah, me,’ said Stephen, evasively, as though wondering who he was.
‘Yes, you.’
Stephen helped himself to a glass more of yellow wine, and began to roll himself a thin little cigarette.
‘Me? Well, to begin with, I would abolish the Royal Family. And after that, all privileges, all titles, all honours, all degrees. I would take degree away, and give the other possibility a chance. I would establish equality of income, and see what happened. That’s what I would do.’
‘Really?’
‘What do you mean by really? I think my programme is at least as practical as Brian’s. Or as Otto’s. Or as the programme of the present government.’
‘What do you mean by practical?’
‘More likely, if implemented, to have a beneficial effect on the community as a whole, and on the individuals that compose it. More likely to promote health, and wealth, and happiness.’
‘I think it’s very sad that Brian should get the sack,’ said Liz. ‘He’s a bloody good teacher, I bet.’
‘Of course he is,’ said Stephen.
‘But your views are even more extreme than Brian’s,’ said Liz.
‘My views,’ said Stephen, ‘belong to another time-scale, they are drawn on another graph altogether. Brian’s tragedy is that he lives now, in this time, in these times. These times are not good for men like Brian, who mean well. I do not mean well. Not personally well. So it does not matter much, to me. And it does not matter much to you, for other reasons. But for Brian and, therefore, for Alix – if you may permit me to speak of Alix, who is your friend, not mine, – for Brian and Alix, these are b-b-bad times.’
‘I think these are mad times,’ said Liz. ‘But here we sit, not at all mad, or at least I don’t think we’re mad, do you? And enjoy our supper. Or, at least, I enjoyed mine. Here we sit, and enjoy our supper. Is that wrong?’
‘Brian and Alix think it is wrong,’ said Stephen, ‘but so great is the despair in my heart, and so great the hope in yours, my dear Elizabeth, that we do not.’
> ‘That’s just phrase-making,’ said Liz, flattered.
‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘It’s called the dying art of conversation.’
The darkest, longest night of the year, and the rain poured against the windscreen, violently, relentlessly: the old car was struggling, and not only against the rain. It had some internal problem: it grew more feeble at every incline, its power was dying in it. Alix, on her way home to Wandsworth from Sussex, feared she would not make it. She had no idea what was wrong with the car: it had been sickening for some days, but she had been unable to consult Brian, for he was in Northam with his dying father, and she had not liked to trouble him. She had been visiting her ex-mother-in-law, Deborah Manning, who was also dying. And the car, with the year, was dying too. The windscreen wipers battled frantically, manically, against the driving sheets of wet: solid water swept darkly on the glass, and through the glass she could only dimly see approaching road works, striped cones, cones blown over the road in the high wet wind. A bad night to be out. In Alix’s view it was St Lucy’s night, the 21st of December, and she recited to herself as much as she could remember of Donne’s Ode: ‘’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s’: and it was indeed almost midnight, it was eleven twenty-five. It had been a long day, a long short day. According to Harvey’s Oxford Companion to English Literature, St Lucy’s Day was not the 21st, the shortest day, but December 13th. Alix did not believe this, but she had been unable to find anyone to support her. She had asked her Garfield students if they had ever heard of St Lucy’s Day, and one of them, a lapsed Catholic, had claimed that it was celebrated on December 20th. Alix’s friend Lucy Hattersley, when consulted, had complicated the issue by talking about the winter solstice. Esther, who knew about iconography and saints, had failed to answer her telephone, and Alix had been unable to find her battered old edition of Donne, which might also have supplied the answer. If St Lucy’s Day really was the 13th, as Harvey claimed, was Donne under the impression that the 13th was the shortest day of the year when it wasn’t? Or had the calendar changed? Or the solstice shifted?
The Radiant Way Page 32