‘It was a bit silly of him,’ said Alix. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’
‘Really not?’
‘Really not.’
And, brushing her teeth, clambering exhausted into bed, Alix thought that it didn’t matter much: she had to see Jilly, of course, one last time: I am in blood so far, to go back were as tedious as go o’er, she recited to herself, as she shut her eyes, expecting instant sleep.
But sleep did not come. She was too tired to sleep. And as she lay there, restless, tired, irritable, she submitted herself to a version of the following questionnaire, prompted, perhaps by the introduction, the off-guard, unexpected introduction of the name of Otto Werner, at the darkest hour of the longest darkest night of the year. Thus the questions presented themselves:
Q. Did she, Alix Bowen, in December 1983, consider that London was a more dangerous, more drug-infested place than it had been when Jilly Fox was convicted of various offences way back in 1979?
A. Yes, she did.
Q. Did she blame the Tory government for this deterioration in law and order?
A. No. Not really.
Q. Yes or no?
A. No.
Q. Did she believe the Labour government for which she had herself voted would have halted this process of deterioration?
A. No. Not really. No.
Q. Would she have given this answer five years earlier?
A. No.
Q. Would Brian expect that a Labour government would have halted this process of deterioration?
A. Yes.
Q. Did Brian believe that the Metropolitan Police was corrupt and racist, and that drug-taking and violence were caused by inner-city decay and rising levels of unemployment?
A. Yes.
Q. Did Alix agree with this?
A. Yes. In part. Yes.
Q. But nevertheless Alix believed that a Labour government could do nothing to halt this process?
A. Yes.
Q. So Alix believed the process was inevitable, and that unemployment would continue to rise, violence to increase, drug-taking to multiply?
A. Yes. Sort of. Yes.
Q. Did Brian believe this?
A. No.
Q. Did Brian believe that a radical left government could rescue Britain from the death throes of capitalism?
A. Yes.
Q. Did she?
A. No.
Q. Did Brian think a radical left government would be elected?
A. It depends what you mean by think.
Q. Answer yes or no.
A. Well, then, no.
Q. Does Brian say he believes a radical left government will be elected?
A. Yes.
Q. Is Brian lying?
A. Not really. Sort of. No.
Q. Do you think a radical left government will be elected?
A. No.
Q. Do you think that the militant group which Brian has joined is hindering the prospects of a Labour government of any complexion?
A. Yes.
Q. Is that its intention?
A. No.
Q. Do you think it possible that Brian’s groups and other such groups, that Arthur Scargill and the Liverpool Council and the left-wing polytechnic-trained intellectuals of Northam are ensuring the continuance of right-wing rule, indeed the increasing popularity of right-wing rule, and are positively encouraging the growing inequality of the society they claim to wish to redeem?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you think as some do think that this is their intention?
A. No.
Q. So you think they are deluded?
A. Yes.
Q. And you think Brian is deluded?
A. Yes.
Q. Can you talk about this to Brian?
A. No.
Q. Why not?
A. I thought I was only allowed to answer yes or no. Could you please rephrase that question?
Q. ? A.? Q.? A.? No.
Q. ? A.? Q.? A.? I think you don’t know how to phrase that question, because you haven’t thought it through properly, because you don’t know how to think it through. Is that correct?
A. Yes.
Q. Have you been trying to suggest that my answers to your questions put me in some kind of representative position of representative confusion?
A. Yes.
Q. You think there are millions more like me?
A. Yes. Well, hundreds of thousands, let us say.
Q. You think I ought to make up my mind?
A. Not necessarily.
Q. Yes or no, remember.
A. No, then. No.
Q. Is that because making up one’s mind involves internalizing lies?
A. Yes.
Q. Could you have conceived, ten years ago, of my occupying this position? This lack of position?
A. No.
Q. What has happened?
A. Q. A. Q. Could you rephrase that question, please?
A. Q. A. Q. A. Q. . . . Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. The dialogue of self and self. On and on and on and on. Self and self, self and self. Alix and Brian can no longer speak, as once they did.
Q. One last question. Do you, Alix Bowen, still call yourself a socialist?
A. Yes.
I’d be very interested, in that case, to hear your definition of the term socialism. So would Brian, I’m sure.
Well, you’ll have to wait.
Wait for what?
I’ll work it out. In the end. You wait.
And meanwhile, you’re prepared to go on living falsely, in a false position, on undefined premises?
Yes. Well, sort of. Yes.
In the morning, Brian rang. His father had died in the night. They talked, muddled, sad, of the funeral, of Christmas, of the car stuck in Croydon, of arrangements. She put the phone down, and it rang again instantly. Nicholas, to ask why she had been home so late, they had tried to ring her to tell her not to worry when she discovered she’d forgotten her reading glasses, they’d found them in the bathroom. We gave up ringing at midnight, we were worried, he said. She told him of Brian’s father’s death. They spoke of Christmas, of altered plans. She put the phone down, and it rang again, instantly: and this time it was Otto Werner, a worried Otto Werner.
‘Alix,’ he said, ‘I’ve been so worried, I’m afraid I’ve been a dreadful fool, you’re going to be so cross with me, and quite right too – I’ve been a dreadful fool, I gave your new phone number to a woman who rang up last night, and then I realized I’ve probably given it to exactly the wrong person, the one person you’re trying to avoid? She said she was your sister, but then I thought later, surely you’d have given your new number to your sister? Do tell me it wasn’t that woman from Garfield. Did she ring?’
Poor Otto, he sounded very guilty. He was guilty.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Alix. ‘It doesn’t matter at all. It’s probably all for the best.’
‘I just wasn’t thinking,’ said Otto, at this confirmation of his crime.
She reassured him. She told him of Brian’s father’s death. She told him about her night on the hard shoulder. Poor Alix, said Otto, with feeling, it’s going to be one of those Christmases, I can tell. And I was also ringing to invite you to a 1984 Twelfth Night party, but it seems a little tactless, in the circumstances, perhaps?
Alix said that on the contrary, they might want above all things to go to a Twelfth Night party. She took down details: Friday 6th, 8 p.m. onwards. Otto kept on apologizing for asking them, she kept on assuring him that they might well turn up. It would be good for Brian, she said, but I suppose it depends on the funeral arrangements. Do try to come, urged Otto. And, as an afterthought: it’s such a long time since you saw Caroline. Caroline would so much like to see you both.
‘We’ll do our best,’ said Alix. ‘Give my love to Caroline.’
‘And hers to you,’ said Otto, vaguely. ‘And hers to you.’
Liz Headleand was also invited to Otto and Caroline Werner’s Twelfth Night party, and accepted with alacrity
. She said she needed the prospect of a party: I’ve had a horrid week, she told Otto over the phone, I hate Christmas, such a hassle and all the family get so cross, and Charles will be in England and wants to come to Christmas dinner with the boys, can you imagine, and then on top of all that we’ve had this disaster with a patient, he’d got this thing about having AIDS – he used to think he’d got cancer, but then he decided it was AIDS. We thought nothing of it, and went on with group therapy as usual, and now it turns out he really has got AIDS and all the group are furious with us, and have lost faith in our diagnostic powers completely, and I must say I can’t blame them, but how could we have known? He was a classic depressive hypochondriac, poor chap, and now he’s got this dreadful dreadful illness. God knows where he picked it up. The whole institute is in a state of depressive hypochondria now. We all think we’ve got it.
Oh dear, never mind, said Otto, who had not been listening. We’ll look forward to seeing you on the Twelfth.
You don’t mean the Twelfth, said Liz, you mean the sixth, don’t you? That’s what you said the first time round. Twelfth Night is the sixth.
Oh God, said Otto, how confusing, and without saying goodbye, absent-mindedly rang off, thinking not of Liz but of Alix Bowen and his own gullibility and culpability. Otto Werner found himself thinking quite often of Alix Bowen these days. More than he used to. He had no idea why. Transferred worry about Brian, perhaps? The last thing he would ever have wanted to do was to make trouble for Alix. She had enough trouble, he feared, with Brian, these days.
Liz put the phone down, wondering how many people Otto had managed to ask for the wrong night and returned to the decoration of the Christmas tree. In theory, Sally and Aaron were helping her, but they had dodged off into the kitchen to eat a toasted sandwich before departing for their respective nights of entertainment. Aaron was off to the theatre to see an Alan Ayckbourn, Sally to a party in Kentish Town. Liz adjusted a streamer of tinsel, and clipped on a silver bird. The tree was gold and silver, this year: no other colours permitted. Liz hadn’t been intending to get a tree, but Sally and Stella had insisted. And there it was. Beautiful, said Aaron, re-entering the room with a mouthful of toast, even better than Harley Street, don’t you think?
Aaron was on good form, these days. His play was to be put on in the New Year, at one of the more established fringe theatres. It was, he informed Liz, a transvestite drama entitled ‘Squeaking Cleopatra’, with a double time scheme, set partly backstage at the first performance of Shakespeare’s tragedy in 1607, and partly backstage at a 1984 production of the same play at one of our large London-based subsidized companies. It’s political drama, said Aaron, about the Arts Council. That’s what he said, but Liz and Sally thought he was joking. Neither of them had been allowed to read the script.
The tree glittered, frostily. I must dash, said Aaron, I’ll see you on Christmas Eve. Enjoy the play, said Liz. Aaron was living in a flat in Highbury, with a couple of friends. It had all worked out well. And Sally too was well: back from India, unemployed, but well, and honourably looking for work. She had an interview with a publisher the next week. But how would she react to Charles? Liz fretted, as she draped the little white lights. Of all the children, Sally had taken Charles’s remarriage worst: she had refused to see him, to speak to him on the phone, to answer his letters, she had even, ominously, refused to bank his conciliatory cheques. She had accused Liz of being feeble, female, slavish, eager to please, in her acceptance of Charles’s defection, Charles’s renewed demands. ‘You just want everyone to love you, Mum,’ she accused Liz, ‘you just want everyone to think you’re wonderful. You should stand up for yourself.
‘But I do,’ said Liz. ‘In my own way. I just don’t like quarrelling, that’s all.’
‘No,’ said Sally, darkly. ‘You prefer to manipulate. Old-fashioned stuff. Underhand stuff.’
‘That’s right,’ said Liz.
And would Sally, now, think the manipulation had paid off? Now that Charles was creeping back to London and begging for his Christmas dinner? Would she think that this was what Liz had wanted? Was it what Liz had wanted? And whatever had happened to Henrietta? Liz hummed ‘In the deep Midwinter’ tunelessly to herself, as she dressed the tree, and thought of all the houses, all over London, all over Britain, where families forced themselves to congregate, to quarrel, to fight, to feud, to smile, to weep, to complain, to overeat, to jostle and gather and litter and lay waste. As children, she and Shirley had hated Christmas, for it had marked them out for the lepers that they were: outcasts, treeless, without kin, without comfort, without presents, without past. She preferred the densely populated world she had created, with all its problems. She was not afraid of Charles, she told herself: no, not at all, not at all afraid. But her hand trembled slightly as she reached to adjust the topmost star: she had achieved calm, after four years of battle; was he on his way to disturb her yet again?
Esther Breuer had decided to spend Christmas in Bologna, with Claudio’s sister Elena, rather than in Manchester, with her parents and her brother’s family, or alone, in Ladbroke Grove. Claudio was in New York, on a sabbatical with his wife. She had seen him only once, since the summer of the lecture of the werewolf: he had been to London for a week in October, and had spent all his free time with her. Hour after hour they had sat together in the red room as in the old days, talking, drinking, talking, talking. But Esther had deceived him, had played him false: she had not given herself, during these long sessions, she had remained detached, conscious, rational. And he had not noticed the difference. This had shocked her. Sitting, now, at Heathrow (for she had decided that, in 1983, at this time of year, at her age, she had to fly), she reflected that this was what had most shocked her – more than his yellow pallor, his shaking hands, loss of appetite, his evident ill health. He could not tell whether she was with him, accompanying him, in his ramblings, or not. Maybe he had never been able to tell, maybe she had herself been deluded into believing in their great, their unique, their disembodied mystic intimacy? How much easier it would have been, to fall once more under the spell, to believe, with Claudio, that black was white and white was black, to allow herself to be, as of old, seduced and hypnotized into half light, into his self-creating, self-perpetuating, self-validating terms and shades. But she had forced herself to withhold herself (remembering Liz by the canal bank, remembering the severed head): had sat, treacherously, faithlessly, emptily, coldly, by his side, faking odd murmurs of response when his monologue halted. She had withdrawn belief, had withdrawn love, and he was falling ill from her refusal, but he knew it not.
She would speak of these things to Elena, her new friend, her new ally.
Her potted palm, astonishingly, survived. Claudio had commented upon its perseverance. It is a long time dying, he had said.
On the way to catch the tube to Heathrow, Esther had passed Jilly Fox on the street, but without knowing it, for although she knew the story of Jilly Fox, almost to the latest instalment, she had never seen her. Jilly Fox was staring at a Standard placard which read ‘HORROR LATEST; ESCAPED VICTIM DESCRIBES ATTACKER’. Esther too paused briefly to stare, before hurrying on. She did not buy a copy.
And now she sat at crowded Heathrow, on the afternoon of 23 December, waiting for her flight to be called, and reading her selected travel literature: she was just beginning to make a little headway with an offprint of ‘Some Florentine Moneyers and Reflections on the Organization of Italian Mints in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’ from the Numismatic Chronicle when she sensed that somebody was trying to attract her attention, looked up, and saw, standing over her, elegant, lightly suited, smiling enquiry and greeting, Stephen Cox.
‘Esther,’ he said, in his slightly husky, polite, hesitant drawl. ‘Are you making a b-bid for freedom as well? Leaving Christmas behind?’
‘That’s the plan,’ said Esther, moving along the padded bench to make room for him. ‘And where are you off to?’ she asked.
He was off to Istan
bul, he said. His flight was delayed. So is mine, said Esther. They chatted, exchanging news. They did not know one another well, but were pleased, for a short time, to meet: lone travellers, escaping England, family, festivities. Because they did not know one another well, they spoke of mutual friends: of Alix, of Brian, of Liz Headleand. Stephen had not heard of Brian’s father’s death, but knew more than Esther of Charles Headleand’s arrival: Charles had already had a row with his son Jonathan, but had at least temporarily placated Sally, according to Liz: and it appeared that the dreaded Henrietta had departed, ambiguously, indecisively, to spend Christmas in Zambia with her daughter, who was married to a farmer there and had just produced a baby. Gossip, they exchanged, in the Eurolounge, until Stephen was called to Gate 36. A Happy Christmas, a Happy New Year, a Happy 1984, they politely wished one another. I prophesy it will be a grim year, said Stephen, but not quite in the way Orwell predicted. And it will be all right for you and for me, if we continue to keep out of the way.
And, smiling, he backed away, and faded, like a mirage, from her sight.
Esther had expected, indeed hoped, to spend the rest of her journey in silence with her Numismatic Chronicle and Cellini’s autobiography, but this was not to be. She found herself placed in a window seat, next to a tallish, young-middle-aged man, whom she vaguely and indifferently noted to be strikingly handsome, in a raffish, casual, seedy sort of way: the handsomeness penetrated her screen of Florentine moneyers, though he was making no effort to project it, nor she to receive it. Indeed, he seemed to be admirably intent, at first, on minding his own business, a little subdued, perhaps, by having hit his head rather smartly on the luggage rack while trying to get out of the turbulent way of a large fur-coated woman with two large teenage sons and a great deal of oddly shaped Harrods-wrapped hand-baggage: he had crumpled into his too-small seat and sat there meekly, staring at nothing much, reaching for his Executive High-Fly Business Magazine, returning it to its pocket with a rustle of boredom, then shutting his eyes, all in the best manner of an habituated, weary, over-travelled man of the world. But as the plane took off, Esther thought she detected in him a slight jerk of alarm, of unnatural tension: it subsided, and he shut his eyes once more, but she felt tension building in him once more after twenty minutes or so, as she heard the rattle of the drinks trolley approach. She was rather looking forward to a stiff festive drink, and was turning over pleasurably in her mind the possibilities: a vodka martini? a couple of whiskies? a whisky and a quarter of champagne? – for it was, after all, Christmas – when she noticed that her neighbour was grabbing the arm of his seat very tightly, and breathing in short, shallow gasps. Was he about to pull out a hand grenade? she inevitably, in 1983, wondered. Was he an international terrorist? Was he an Italian Neo-Fascist, an Italian Marxist, a member of the PLO? He did not look Italian: he looked more Nordic. She didn’t think he was English: she had glimpsed a foreign-looking passport in his inner pocket as he reached for his cigarettes. He was smoking now, somewhat frantically: maybe he was merely trying, unsuccessfully, to give up nicotine, and suffering from withdrawal symptoms?
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