The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Charles, clutching his head, ‘could you either stop arguing or turn down the volume or both? My God, it’s hot in here.’

  And then the cat was sick.

  ‘It’s hell here,’ moaned Liz to Alix over the phone. ‘Pure hell. They never stop quarrelling and watching telly. Both at once.’

  ‘It’s much the same up here,’ said Alix, but more glumly, with less spirit, from her parents’ bungalow in Leeds.

  Esther and Elena smiled at one another gently, quietly, over their Christmas grappa, in perfect harmony, in deep peace.

  The Bowens’ Renault stood in a garage at Croydon. Its fault had been diagnosed: some witty Wandsworth vandal had shoved a bird’s nest up its exhaust.

  It was still Christmas Day in St John’s Wood. Liz could hardly believe it had gone on so long. And unaccountably, improbably, after eating a vast lunch at two, everybody seemed by eight to want to eat again. Nothing much, just a snack, they all cried, and Liz was standing in the kitchen making smoked-salmon sandwiches when the telephone rang. It was her sister Shirley. ‘But I spoke to her this morning,’ Liz began, defensively, in response to Shirley’s opening phrase, ‘It’s mother’: and then, in the ensuing silence, quickly replayed, re-read that phrase, that intonation, and for one wild glorious moment hoped that her mother was dead. ‘What is it?’ she asked, as Shirley said nothing. ‘Shirley?’ And Shirley explained that their mother had had a stroke. She gave details. Quite a severe stroke, but not, said Shirley grimly, severe enough. She had been admitted to hospital.

  ‘You’d better come up and see her,’ said Shirley. ‘Because I’m damned if I’m going to cope with this alone.’ Her voice was suddenly trembling with rage. ‘Five bloody years I’ve waited, and you haven’t lifted a finger, you haven’t come near, you haven’t done a bloody thing,’ said Shirley. ‘Well, I’ve had enough. I won’t go on, do you hear, I won’t. You can come up here and take over. I can’t go on. You are the most selfish woman on God’s earth, Liz Ablewhite, and I hate you. I hate you. Do you hear? I hate you.’

  The Christmas spirit.

  ‘Of course I’ll come,’ said Liz. ‘Calm down, Shirley, you’ve had a horrible shock. I’ll work out how to get there, and I’ll ring you back. Are you at home?’

  ‘Of course I’m at home. Where the hell else do you expect me to be? Wherever else am I? Ever, ever, ever?’ shrieked Shirley.

  ‘There, there,’ said Liz, and put down the phone. Mechanically, she went on cutting sandwiches, as tears of shock and indignation and self-justification and fatigue started to her eyes. Raised voices from the drawing-room reached her: they were shouting about dish receivers, and the break-up of the fabric of society, above the sound-track of an old American movie of gangsters in LA.

  The news of Rita Ablewhite’s stroke was greeted, over the sandwiches, with an embarrassed silence. So something had happened, at last, in this non-story, this non-sequence of non-events. Nobody could find an appropriate response. Was Liz Headleand judged, at this moment, for her neglect of her mother, for her failure to answer earlier appeals? Did she judge herself? It was not clear. She gave them no lead. She passed round the sandwiches silently, and sighed, several times. Then she said, as the silence prolonged itself uncomfortably, ‘I spoke to her this morning. She sounded all right this morning. Much the same as ever, really.’

  The young people looked down at their plates.

  ‘I sent her a Christmas card,’ volunteered Stella.

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz. ‘Yes, she mentioned she’d got it. That was nice of you, Stella.’ She spoke dully, evenly. Rita Ablewhite’s other step-grandchildren and grandchildren eyed one another covertly, guiltily: they had not sent cards, had not set eyes on the old woman for many years, could not imagine what had got into Stella.

  ‘I’ll have to go up to Northam, I suppose,’ said Liz. ‘I can’t leave it all to Shirley.’ Without emotion, flatly. ‘What a nightmare,’ Liz said.

  ‘I’ll drive you up,’ said Charles. ‘In the morning. You can’t do anything now. I’ll take you up, in the morning.’

  ‘Really?’ said Liz, without much change of tone, as though deeply unsurprised by this somewhat surprising offer. ‘That would be kind.’

  Charles’s children and Liz’s children looked at one another, as they sat slouched around the drawing-room. Alan helped himself to another sandwich from the tray at his feet. ‘Hey, pass them over here,’ said Aaron, observing this. The sandwiches were passed. Coffee was poured. Sally looked at her watch. Jonathan eyed the television set. Liz stared into space. The Christmas tree sparkled. Charles yawned. Jonathan cleared his throat. ‘Liz,’ he said, ‘would you mind very much if we just watched a few minutes of Martin’s programme? It’s on in a couple of minutes.’

  They all stared at Liz. ‘No, no, of course not,’ she said absently, ‘watch away, please do.’

  ‘It was a lovely day, Mummy,’ said Sally: anxiously, questioningly, ironically: as Jonathan crawled across the floor to switch on. It was the end of the Queen’s speech, yet again. ‘Oh my God,’ said Alan: Jonathan switched channels, quickly: Aaron began to laugh: and they all began to laugh, heartlessly, companionably, as life flowed again, as their mother unfroze and smiled, and began herself to laugh: ‘Yes, yes,’ said Liz, herself again: ‘a simply lovely day.’

  Driving northward, up the M1, on Boxing Day, Charles attempted to bring Liz up-to-date on the subject of dish receivers, birds, footprints and NTVROs. His company had long been planning to develop their struggling subsidiary, the hubristically-labelled Global International Network, into a truly global, international, satellite-transmitted and dish-received commercial news agency. The plans had gone wrong, because Charles in New York had backed the wrong kind of technology. Charles was in disgrace. He had erred paradoxically through insufficient patriotism: brainwashed by years of confident American sales-talk, he had crucially underestimated a small British homegrown discovery, and had found himself outwitted. Charles explained some of this to Liz, as his mind roved over Anglo-American relations in general and his own discomfiture in particular. Was she listening, could she follow him? Who could tell? One could never tell, with Liz. When it suited her, she played the Little Woman, unable to follow a manual for tuning a car radio, yawning with boredom at the mention of anything electronic, even protesting (implausibly, surely) that she was not interested in The News: but on various occasions over the Christmas period he had heard her dropping some well-informed comments on information technology, videotex, and videodata, when discussing the philosophical implications of this brave new world with Jonathan and Alan. There she sat, listening or not listening: Charles’s voice described a landscape covered in watching white bowls, turned like sunflowers, moonflowers, to the speaking sky. Why, he wondered, was he driving her all this way? To get away from those huge, threatening, amazing overgrown children in London? As revenge on Henrietta? As an act of kindness? He did not know. The visionary white uplifted faces watched, beseeching, as the dirty grey featureless landscape unrolled: exits and entrances. The miners would strike, in the New Year. The Old Country. English drivers! thought Charles in the fast lane, slamming on the brakes of his hired Ford Sierra to frighten the bastard on his tail. The most aggressive in the world. He had forgotten, after years of courteous America, how bloody the English were.

  Liz sat silent, distant, unaware. She was trying to reconstruct what might prove to have been her last conversation with her mother: her last opportunity to ask questions, receive answers. What had they talked about on Christmas morning? Nothing, as usual. ‘How are you, mother?’ ‘Not too badly, I don’t complain.’ ‘Happy Christmas.’ ‘What’s happy about it?’ ‘We’re all here, all the family, we all send our love.’ ‘Stella sent me a card.’ ‘Oh, good. How’s Shirley?’ ‘Not too badly.’ ‘How’s the weather up there?’ ‘Raining.’ ‘It’s been raining here, too, but it’s a little brighter now.’ ‘How’s Stella enjoying Cambridge?’ ‘Very much, she says.’ ‘Has Sally got
herself a job yet?’ ‘No, not yet, but she’s looking.’ ‘Did you hear about that accident at Pontefract? I heard about it on the radio.’ ‘No, tell me about it.’ And so on, and so on. They had discussed Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime (a Surtees novel, which Rita Ablewhite had not liked, and which Liz had not heard, though she pretended she had) and the intellectual aspirations of Celia Harper (in which her grandmother took considerable interest, to Liz unaccountably) and then, duty done, they had said goodbye. A long goodbye, as it might prove. And the greatest enigma of all, to Liz, remained the knowledge that this conversation (one of many thousands), if reported, if tape-recorded and played back, would have betrayed, even to her own, expert, deviance-detecting ear, no trace of abnormality, of eccentricity: motes and beams, motes and beams. What was the Latin name for those little floating particles that drift, transparently, amoeba-like, across the surface of the eyeball?

  Charles, turning off the motorway, following signposts, muttered that the place had changed out of all recognition. Liz, too, found it changed, and could only with difficulty direct him to the Royal Infirmary: it’s the one-way system, she said, as they circled for the third time round the same stretch of inner ring road. In the hospital car park, they parted; Charles to investigate hotels, Liz to seek her mother.

  ‘Cheer up, old thing, cheer up, sweetie,’ he said, on the tarmac, patting her on the back, bracingly. ‘It’ll be all over soon. I’ll be back in an hour.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said faintly, and made her way to the smoothly sliding automated portals.

  But it might not be over soon, it seemed. Rita Ablewhite lay semi-conscious, and might so lie for months, for years. Liz stared at the heap of flesh that was her mother. Shirley was right, she had put on weight, mountainously. Four stone, over the past six years. Monstrous. She did not seem to know Liz, did not seem to know anything. Liz stood by the bedside and stared. The flesh twitched. One side of the face was paralysed: it sagged, lopsided. This is nothing to do with me, thought Liz, and yet it is myself. Dry eyed she stared. The hospital staff was polite but obliquely censorious. Liz felt her own face twitch, drily, as she answered their questions: her skin was dry and soft with age at the sight of her mother. The hospital smell filled her with nausea. Obscene Christmas decorations dangled in the ward. Dusty fluff lay under the beds in little rolls and wisps. Rita Ablewhite’s hair was thin and white and wispy: her scalp showed, freckled. Liz Ablewhite’s scalp prickled. An old woman behind a screen further down the ward moaned and called out ‘Mummy! Mummy!’

  I can’t take very much of this, said Liz to herself, as she followed the staff nurse into an office, made an appointment to call back the next day to speak to a specialist. Shirley, the nurse told her, had been in that morning, would call back in the evening. Yes, said Liz.

  Charles was waiting in the foyer by a doll’s tea-party, a heap of balding teddy bears and a Christmas raffle stall: he was gazing with some distaste at an ill-cast ill-painted plaster-of-Paris snowman. Liz was very pleased to see him. ‘Come on, out of here,’ said Charles, taking her arm, tucking it into his: ‘That’s quite enough for one day.’

  And off he drove her, despite half-hearted protests about going to see Shirley, to the Open Hearth Hotel, out on the Breasbrough Road. ‘This is all completely new,’ said Liz, at first feebly, then with more interest, as they left the City Centre and old Victorian suburbs of huge granite mock-castles behind them, and wound up towards the new, 1970s, plate-glass-windowed, prosperous executive belt. Northam shone below them in the darkening afternoon light, as they circled upwards. And there, gleaming its welcome, was the Open Hearth Hotel: long, low, bright, modern, crowded with palms and bamboos and bars, a swimming-pool glinting from a jungle of tropical foliage at the far side of Reception. ‘Good Lord,’ said Liz, ‘whatever is this place?’ Charles smiled, proudly, as he checked in: Liz gazed in astonishment at advertisements for Jacuzzi, for Sauna, for Gymnasia, for Beauty Parlours, for Conference Suites. There was even, it appeared, a Heliport Facility. Liz, clutching her overnight bag, inspected the sequence of photographs and engravings that adorned the walls: they told the story of the Open Hearth process of steelmaking through artists’ impressions of idealized nineteenth-century ironworks and steelworks, with tall chimneys bravely smoking, through historic early twentieth-century photographs of furnacemen stoking and fettlers fettling. One wall was occupied by a large reproduction, in some strange laminated varnished material, of a Prospect of Northam from Chay Bank, taken from a mid-nineteenth-century oil painting: in the lofty rustic foreground, a group of village boys played with a whip and top, watched by an eager dog, while an old man smoked his pipe, leaning on a pile of millstones beneath a tree: in the distant scoop of backdrop, chimneys smoked: and beyond them rose again the barren hills. A curiously evocative landscape, thought Liz, as Charles appeared by her side and led her off to a carpet-walled lift.

  ‘Charles,’ repeated Liz, over a cup of tea in the bedroom that she had, from two identical twin-bedded rooms, selected: ‘Charles, what is all this? I thought the North of England was in decline?’

  ‘I must say,’ said Charles, ‘it is a bit of a surprise. A mistaken speculation, I’d say. It’s probably frequented largely by journalists and television crews making programmes about the decline of the North of England. But it may do well out of functions. Weddings, conferences, that kind of thing. There’s still a lot of money around, even up here.’

  ‘I wish I’d brought my bathing-suit,’ said Liz. ‘How ever did you find it?’

  ‘Oh, I rang up a friend, last night,’ said Charles, vaguely. ‘A chap who used to be in Pennine Television. He recommended it. In fact, he owns it.’ Liz laughed briefly.

  ‘I ought to ring Shirley,’ said Liz, ‘but I can’t quite face it. I think I’ll ring Alix, instead.’

  ‘A most extraordinary place,’ Liz was saying to Brian Bowen, in Shirley Harper’s sitting-room, eating a cold turkey sandwich and drinking a glass of wine. Pre-funeral baked meats. Brian had still been unable to bury his father: his father lay in the morgue in the Royal Infirmary, eleven storeys beneath the ward in which Rita Ablewhite uneasily reposed. ‘It has a Heliport Facility. I want to ask if it’s ever been used, but I daren’t,’ said Liz.

  ‘Paralysed down the right side,’ Shirley was saying to Alix Bowen. ‘Apparently that means it’s the left side of the brain. But they say her heart could give at any moment.’

  ‘They’ve fixed the housing committee, and the education committee,’ Cliff Harper was saying to Charles Headleand, ‘and now they’re trying to fix the library committee, ordering books on Marx and Lenin. There’s a chap called Blinkhorn, Perry Blinkhorn: he lost his seat on the Council at the last election, but he’s been co-opted onto every sub-committee. It’s a scandal, it’s illegal, but what can you do? They’ll ruin this city. Ruin it.’

  Alix Bowen was listening not to Shirley’s description of Rita Ablewhite’s stroke but, obliquely, to Cliff Harper’s accusations: she was hoping Brian could not hear them too, for if Cliff and Brian were to engage, there would be trouble. Luckily, Brian seemed to be gripped by Liz’s evocation of the Open Hearth Hotel: his grandfather had worked as a furnaceman with an Open Hearth furnace, he was telling Liz.

  ‘Incontinent, and I couldn’t find her spare set of keys,’ Shirley was saying.

  Celia Harper, sixteen years old, perched on the arm of a settee and listened. Celia Harper never went out of an evening. Her brothers had left home, gone their ways, but she stayed, and sat, and listened, and bided her time. She was studying for her A levels. Other girls took time off in the First Year Sixth, even from the hard-working, well-disciplined Northam Girls’ High School, but not Celia Harper. She nursed her fantasies, she nursed her grudges, she coiled her springs. And now she dangled a pretty ankle and toyed with a cheese biscuit (for she was very thin, unnaturally thin) and observed her relatives (her rarely, her uniquely, assembled relatives) through cool, grey, expressionless eyes. This Christmas had produced surp
rises. Charles and Liz Headleand, Alix and Brian Bowen, summoned by Death, summoned by the corpse of shrivelled, sad little Uncle Fred Bowen, by the powerful will of that fat inert old woman. Celia had taken to visiting her grandmother of late: she had acquainted herself with the secrets of that time-locked house. She knew things that nobody knew. She kept them to herself.

  ‘That Ideal Boiler hasn’t been out in thirty years,’ her mother was saying to Alix Bowen.

  Celia watched, and listened. The atmosphere was strange, hot, at once flat and feverish: the end of an era seemed to be at hand, barriers were low, the unlikely, the uncanny were loose in the air. Cliff opened another bottle of wine, recklessly: Liz lit a cigarette: Shirley, worrying about the house in Abercorn Avenue, toyed nervously with her silver locket. ‘It’s nostalgia,’ Brian was saying to Liz, ‘nostalgia. The bookshops here are full of it. Old Northam, the Good Old Days, the wonderful old days of furnace and canal. You can buy all sorts of rubbish. Ashtrays, paper weights, calendars, even jars of marmalade with views of the Old Forge in Victorian times, and damn silly little fake cloth tops tied over the screwtop to make them look as though Granny made them. But can you buy a pair of nail scissors? I tried to buy a pair of decent nail scissors last week, and there weren’t any. There was rubbish from Taiwan, and dinky little teenage doll’s scissors with pink plastic handles called Judy and Belinda. Rubbish. No scissors. In the end I found a proper pair. They were made in Finland.’

  ‘Cliff’s wing-mirror pieces come from Taiwan,’ said Liz, holding out her glass as Cliff approached with the bottle, ‘don’t they, Cliff?’

  ‘You might as well have a mince pie,’ said Shirley to her ex-brother-in-law, Charles Headleand. ‘They’re home made.’