The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  So Alix had changed her telephone number, to the considerable inconvenience of the whole family, and to the deep suspicion of Dr Streeter, who was convinced that Brian had changed the number because he had reason – good reason – to believe his phone was being tapped by the police. Alix had found herself for a while imprisoned at times in her own house, lying flat beneath the drawing-room window when she glimpsed Jilly in the street below, crouching beneath the panes of the glass front door as the doorbell rang and rang; once she dodged into the British Council car park in Spring Gardens as she saw Jilly stationed in a dark corner of Cockspur Court as she walked to the bus stop from work. Crouching there, hidden behind a red Triumph down on the seventh level, her heart beating fast with fear and humiliation and sorrow, she had witnessed strange sights, strange car-park sights of the underground city: a dapper executive eating a hamburger from a square box with ravenous, with starving speed and a demented, hunted expression: a woman who removed her jersey, sniffed her arm pits, sat there in her brassière, applied deodorant, then reclothed herself in a blouse and jacket and calmly made up her face, smiling at herself obsequiously, seductively, in her driving mirror: a strange, furtive interchange over an open car boot between a policeman and a young man with an orange sports bag and a squash racket; a weeping older woman with an angry younger man. Half an hour she had crouched, hidden away, waiting for Jilly to move, waiting for Jilly to give up and grow bored and go away. Hard, it was, the hardening of her heart, but eventually, after some weeks, it worked: Jilly stopped haunting her, gave up hope of her, moved elsewhere. Alix felt like a murderer. Where had Jilly gone? She had liked Jilly, had loved Jilly, had loved the desperate edge of her, the rocky hardness of her, the sullen recalcitrance of her. When she vanished, she missed her.

  Jilly had written her a letter, for Christmas. Not a very soothing letter, not, in conventional terms at least, a very Christmas-spirited letter.

  Dear Alix, dearest Alix,

  I forgive you [it read]. I would like you to know that I forgive you, for I shall not last long. You will think to hear the last news of me soon. But it will not be the last news, for I shall be with you for ever. There is no death. There is death only of the body. This have I learned. I fly, I fly into the higher air, and I look down and see the small world turning. The upper reaches are thick with spirits. Perpetual life. The cry of the cockatrice is transformed into the music of the spheres. There is no evil: evil and good are one. At the extremities we meet. Crime is not: sin is not: evil is not: all is good, all is holy. The winter solstice is now, and for ever, and never, for the light shines for ever, in eternal glory, and we are consumed and not consumed in everlasting fire. Dear Alix, I no longer need your telephone number, for I speak to you magically, in my thoughts, whenever I wish. Goodbye, goodbye, and Happy Christmas.

  This letter had been written in a perfectly normal hand on perfectly ordinary Basildon Bond paper. The postmark was W 10. There was no address, and the date Jilly had given was not the December date when it had clearly been written, but the date of Jilly’s own birth: 7 July 1958. Alix did not show it to Eric and Hannah: she felt she had in this context showed them perhaps too much obedience, perhaps too much respect. She did not even think of showing it to the new warden, Miss Higden. It was none of Miss Higden’s business, and never would be. But she did show it to Liz. Liz read it with curiosity, and said at once, ‘Drugs. Obviously. She’s back on drugs. What was she on before?’ Alix listed, as best she could, the drugs she believed Jilly had been taking before her committal: ‘Yes,’ said Liz, ‘yes, that would figure. Easy enough to get hold of these days.’ Liz did not seem surprised. Alix supposed that she was not herself surprised. Nevertheless, she had said, from loyalty to the Jilly she had known, ‘But it’s so sad, Jilly was such a – such a reasonable person. Such a rational person, really. And now this – this nonsense?’

  ‘Well,’ said Liz, rather unexpectedly, ‘it’s not such nonsense. And it’s rather well written, really. It may not be the last of her at all.’

  ‘You mean she may get through it? Recover?’

  ‘People do. It’s very usual, when you come out like that, to go on a binge, isn’t it? Of drink, or drugs, or whatever you’re hooked on? I’m sure I would myself, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And some people get over it?’

  ‘Some, yes.’ Liz had peered at the letter again. ‘That bit about the cockatrice is a bit odd, isn’t it? What is a cockatrice? Is it Biblical?’

  And she had diverted the conversation from Jilly, expertly, but had left Alix with a glimmer of hope. Alix prayed for Jilly, now, at the winter solstice, as she sat in her car in the driving rain. A leak had developed, water was dripping on the back seat. Midnight. The year’s turning. This is ridiculous, thought Alix suddenly, I can’t sit here, I must get to a phone. There are phones on motorways. I’ll ring the AA. Come on, get moving, she said to herself, and ate another square of fruit and nut.

  Walking was difficult, along the hard shoulder, in the harsh orange fluorescent fallout, in the wet blare of the headlamps of other, luckier, mobile motorists. No Good Samaritan paused for Alix, and Alix, still brooding on her cruelty to Jilly, felt she did not deserve one. She would get the help she and Brian had paid for, from the AA. Luckily she had her Associate Member’s Card with her: luckily she had Sam’s yellow-hooded cagoule to keep her dry. She hoped she was walking towards the nearest telephone: she had been told (but maybe it was folklore?) that motorway telephones were never more than half a mile apart. Rain bleared her glasses even though her head was bent against the weather: she took them off and put them in Sam’s pocket, where she encountered the end of a tube of mints, a no doubt filthy handkerchief, a crumpled, soft, matted, decomposing piece of paper, and his Swiss Army knife. The Swiss Army knife made her smile, reassured her. He was a proper boy, Sam: a proper boy, as Nicholas had never been. A boy with a father. Brian adored Sam: maybe they should have had more children, but they had agreed, by unspoken consent, to preserve an equilibrium, to rest there, not to push their luck. Their luck. Well, yes, they had been lucky, so far, but the prospects for 1984 were perhaps appropriately bleak. Brian had been asked to conduct a class, as part of his interview at Glosely Poly: a class of unknown students, in front, as it were, of an examining tribunal. An insult, at this age, she felt on his behalf, although he did not say so himself. At times, Alix could not bring herself to think about Brian.

  Wherever was the telephone? She plodded on. A car slowed down to inspect her, and she waved at it for help, but it drove on: kerb crawling seemed an unlikely pastime on such a night as this, think of the discomfort, but one never knew, some people were desperate. Maybe she presented a mad, a formidable figure, as she walked alone through the darkness in a yellow cagoule, wisps of greyish hair escaping and blowing in the gale? Motorway rape was a relatively new phenomenon: women drivers forced off the road, kidnapped, abducted, raped, hijacked, dumped in distant fields or trussed in warehouses. Alix fingered the stubby smooth closed heavy knife. She refused to be afraid of her fellow-citizens. She refused. Defiantly, she put up her thumb for the next passing car (which ignored or did not see her), but a moment later caught sight of the welcoming phone. She didn’t, of course, know what to do with it when she reached it, never having been in such an emergency before: it didn’t seem to have a proper dial. She looked for instructions but failed to spot them. Eventually she lifted the receiver, and after a while a comfortingly normal voice said: ‘Yes? Can I help you?’ Alix explained. The policeman on the other end of the line told her to return to her vehicle and wait for the AA. ‘All right,’ said Alix, meekly. And off she went, back towards her car, for what must have been at least half a mile: emboldened, she thumbed every vehicle that passed, thinking she might at least get back into the relatively dry car as quickly as possible. But nobody stopped. Nobody. She was mildly shocked. On such a night, mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire, she quoted? misquoted? to herself, as
she made her way, more easily, with the wind behind her, to the waiting Renault.

  And there, marooned, she sat. For a quarter of an hour, half an hour, three quarters of an hour.

  The police had been unable to give her any idea of how long she would have to wait. One in the morning, a quarter past one. Her thoughts returned, inevitably, through boredom, to Jilly Fox. Jilly had spoken very eloquently of boredom and in the end Alix had been obliged to listen. It was boredom that had driven her to drugs and crime: and in her case, the crime had not been wholly in pursuit of the drugs, it had been embraced for its own sake. For thrills, for excitement, for a sense of being alive, for a momentary freedom from the tyranny of time. ‘All my childhood,’ Jilly had told Alix, ‘I sat with my eyes on the clock, waiting for things to be over. Waiting for time to pass. Bored? I thought I’d die. I thought I’d die of boredom. And I mean die. I thought I’d just stop breathing, at the dinner table, in front of telly, in school prayers, in lessons. I used to play these games with myself – that I mustn’t look at my watch or at the clock until I’d counted three hundred backwards, until my father had cleared his throat three times, until a cloud edged across the window pane, until the history teacher blew her nose – and then I’d look, and only a poxy five minutes would have passed. Five miserable minutes, out of a lifetime. And it just seemed stupid – wrong, stupid – to spend the rest of my life waiting for time to pass. Glad when every day was over. Sorry when I woke up every morning. Relieved whenever a minute passed without my counting it out, second by second. What was wrong with me? I don’t know. When I was high, time flew. And it was even better, breaking into the chemist’s, breaking into corner shops. The excitement. Planning what to go for. Hiding in the dark. Listening out. Hearing one’s heart beat. You know what I mean?’

  Garfield, Jilly had admitted, had eventually given the hours, the days, the weeks, a meaning. The régime had parcelled time out, carved it up, made shares of it. Better than boarding-school, because less full of lies, Jilly said.

  One has to learn to parcel out one’s own time. To make shapes of it for oneself, said Alix, piously.

  Oh, I know the theory, said Jilly. But how? How? How? And why? Who cares? Why?

  Half past one. The rain, at last, had abated. Where was Jilly now, on what bare floor, on what damp mattress, beneath what leaking roof?

  Alix thought of Esther, who had made sense of time: or so it seems. The thought of Esther comforted her. The aesthetic principle. The organizing principle. Esther’s interests were timeless, enduring. Solitary.

  The axolotl, on the other hand, had missed out. It had got stuck. Sam had been studying the axolotl at school, in zoology. He had been captivated by its unusual morphology, its eccentricity, its harmlessness. He had done a project on the axolotl. He had always liked underwater creatures, had begged for a fish tank which he kept stocked with snails and caddis larvae, water daphnia, beetles: he was too compassionate to keep fish. It upset him to see them swim in circles. He wanted to live in a house in the country with a pond. He wanted a springer spaniel. There was a fair-sized pond in the grounds of Deborah’s house in Sussex. When Deborah died, he would be able to go to stay with his half-brother Nicholas and study pond-life in the summer. The teaming life of the meniscus, the darting minnows below, the crawlers of the deep. In Wandsworth, there was no space for a pond or for a springer spaniel. In Glosely, she doubted very much if there would be space for a pond or a springer spaniel, though perhaps housing would be cheaper, up in Leicestershire? The thought of Glosely depressed her dreadfully. Its very name (though of course the poor place could not help its name) struck a chill to the heart, and its description in Robert Waller’s Almanac of British Politics offered little comfort: a New Town in danger of becoming a Ghost Town, a Midlands anomaly, a manufacturing town flanked to the North and East by Tory foxhunters, to the South and West by nuclear missiles and army camps. Glosely had been designated, in 1981, as one of the first Enterprise Zones in England: a dubious accolade. There were prospects of new jobs in frozen foods and potato crisps. And the most depressing aspect of the prospect of flat, barbed-wire, muddy Glosely was that Brian would not get the job. It would go to a younger man. A younger man with safer references.

  Brian, redundant, would have time to write his novel, the great chronicle novel of the Northern working class. Brian would be forced, by redundancy, to confront the knowledge that time was not what he needed, Brian would turn sour. Already he had become unreasonable: later, he would, like everyone else, become sour.

  Alix had suggested to Jilly Fox that she try to write. Jilly had looked at Alix with contempt and said, ‘What, me? Adding to the crap? How I was a gangster’s moll? How I came off the hard stuff? How I tried to kill my father? That kind of shit? No thanks.’

  Jilly Fox, like Shakespeare, did not approve of playing, in wench-like words, with that which was most serious. Although, when constrained, when forced through lack of other options, she had enjoyed reading, in class, for Alix: had studied well, passed exams, had enthusiasm. She would never continue, of her own accord. She knew that. Alix knew that. Why?

  I have failed Jilly, thought Alix: she pushed out of her mind, as too painful, too unbearable, too raw, the notion that she was now, even now, and more profoundly, in the process of failing Brian. She concentrated on Jilly Fox. She ate a mint. She was frozen.

  The AA, when at last it arrived, did not fail Alix. It arrived in the form of a pick-up truck and a young man with a moustache. He clucked and hummed and muttered over the open bonnet, walked round and round the car several times, and delivered his verdict: it was the exhaust. It could not be fixed there and then: he would take the Renault to a garage in Croydon, and Alix home to her bed. ‘Lucky you’d got a Relay membership,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ said Alix, meekly, and meek she remained as he entertained her on the way to Wandsworth with various faintly sexist anecdotes about women drivers in distress: he was chivalry itself compared with her one-time driving instructor, who had made her drive round Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus with her L-plates while he described what he would do to the layabouts, tramps and addicts who huddled disconsolately there on steps and benches: ‘I’d dig a large pit,’ this man had declared, ‘and shovel them into it, and douse them with petrol, and set fire to the lot!’ The AA man confined himself to stories about women summoning him to tune their car radios or to enquire why their engines had stopped when they had merely run out of petrol: some women, said the AA man, believe you me, don’t even know what a dip-stick is. Amazing, murmured Alix politely. There was no fight in her, and anyway, what he said was no doubt, in its own terms, true.

  He dropped her on her own doorstep. ‘You’ll be all right, then?’ he enquired, glancing up at the narrow dark building. ‘Oh yes,’ she reassured him, thanking him effusively: if she had been young, wild, sexy, would she have asked him up? Did he sometimes get asked up? It was three in the morning. He drove off, waving goodbye: she switched on the hall-light and locked the door behind her, and as she locked it, the telephone began to ring.

  She hesitated. Brian, with news of his father? Sam, ill? Nicholas and Ilse, with news of Deborah? Any of them might have been ringing all evening, might have continued to ring, anxiously, finding her neither there nor in Sussex. She lifted the phone. ‘Hello,’ she said, ready with explanations. But it was, as she had half suspected, Jilly Fox.

  ‘Alix?’ said Jilly. ‘Alix, is that you?’

  ‘Jilly,’ said Alix. ‘Is that you?’ She was curiously relieved to hear her voice.

  ‘I was ringing to wish you a Happy Christmas,’ said Jilly.

  ‘What, at this hour?’ said Alix, in her old school-teacher voice.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s three in the morning,’ said Alix.

  ‘And where’ve you been? I’ve been ringing for hours. For hours and hours and hours.’ Accusing.

  ‘I’ve been sitting in the rain on the motorway,’ said Alix. ‘I’ve just got in,’ she explai
ned, briefly.

  ‘Poor you,’ said Jilly. She didn’t sound high, or mad, or desperate: she sounded like her old sharp self. ‘Alix,’ said Jilly, ‘let me come and see you. One last time. I’ve things to tell you.’

  ‘You know I can’t,’ said Alix.

  ‘One last time. Then I’ll never bother you again. I promise. I solemnly promise. Please, Alix.’

  Alix temporized.

  ‘I’ll come and see you,’ she offered. ‘Tell me where you are.’

  ‘Will you? Will you really?’ Jilly sounded pleased, innocently pleased. ‘Will you come soon?’

  ‘I’ll come after Christmas,’ said Alix. ‘I’ve got to go up North, tomorrow, to see my family. I’ll see you when I get back. Tell me where to find you.’

  Jilly told. She was in a squat, Lykewake Gardens, off the Harrow Road. Alix could find her there, but should come in the afternoon: mornings are hopeless, said Jilly, and evenings are worse. They agreed on an afternoon: Monday, 9 January 1984. ‘I’ll be there,’ said Alix. Four o’clock. Prompt. Then, as an afterthought, asked where Jilly was calling from?

  ‘From a friend’s,’ said Jilly. ‘A lady friend’s.’

  ‘And how did you get my new telephone number?’ asked Alix.

  A brief silence.

  ‘From Otto Werner,’ said Jilly, and laughed.

  ‘From Otto Werner?’ echoed Alix. ‘But you don’t know Otto Werner.’

  ‘No, I don’t. But I know that you and your husband know him. You made me read an article by him once, remember? So I rang him. He’s in the telephone book. I rang him. And he told me. Silly of him, wasn’t it?’