The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Alix stared at this apparition. The apparition stared at Alix.

  ‘Jilly,’ said Alix. ‘It’s me. You asked me to come.’

  Silently, mournfully, Jilly beckoned. Alix followed the candle’s small light down a narrow corridor, smelling of damp, ancient glue, wet plaster, chalk, mice: the floorboards were soft and uneven with layers of debris of newspapers and cardboard and bits of underfelt. Jilly went into a back room, a small back room, unfurnished save for two mattresses on the floor and a small table and some boxes. Jilly gestured to Alix, indicating that she should sit upon one of the mattresses. In the dim light Alix peered at it suspiciously. Impossible to tell how dirty it might or might not be. But what could she do? She sat. It was cold. A paraffin heater stood in a corner, but it was not lit. Alix shivered, and stared enquiringly at Jilly, who continued to stand holding her candle, expressionless.

  ‘Jilly,’ said Alix, ‘you asked me to tea. Have you got any tea?’

  ‘Look,’ said Jilly. ‘Look at these.’ And with her candle, she attempted to illumine the walls of the room: the walls were covered in paintings, dreadful, psychotic paintings. Daggers, pierced hearts, severed heads, dripping blood, gaping wounds, severed limbs, floating eyes. Alix could see them, not clearly, but rather more clearly than she would have chosen. A rat gnawed a human foot. A monkey drank a jar of blood. A breast floated on a plate. A tooth was held aloft by pincers. A starfish flamed in the sky. They were crudely drawn, crudely painted, somewhat in the manner of 1970s London mural folk art, and they were vividly, all too vividly representational. Alix shivered again, and stood up, to look more closely at the detail.

  ‘Who did all this?’ she asked, in as normal a voice as she could summon.

  Jilly shook her head. ‘I inherited them,’ she said, huskily.

  ‘You mean they were here when you got here?’

  ‘In a way,’ said Jilly. She pointed to the bottom left-hand corner. ‘But that bit’s mine. I added that. My cockatrice.’

  And in the corner, indeed, stood a strange little monster, half-hatched from an egg: a twining serpent with a beaked cock’s head, a red cock’s comb. Alix stared, censorious.

  ‘Do you live here?’ asked Alix. ‘I can’t think it’s very cheerful, living with this stuff on the walls. And it’s bloody cold, Jilly, haven’t you got any kind of heating? No paraffin?’

  ‘The electricity’s cut off,’ said Jilly. ‘And anyway, what does it matter? I’m just waiting for the end.’

  ‘I want a cup of tea,’ said Alix forlornly. Then pursued: ‘What do you mean, waiting for the end?’

  ‘The end,’ said Jilly. ‘If I just wait here, it will come soon. Can’t you tell?’

  Alix could indeed tell, but nevertheless took it upon herself to try to argue and reason with Jilly. She must see her social worker, get herself rehoused, get a job, even, perhaps, get in touch with her mother? Do something to get out of this – this macabre dump, said Alix, gesticulating wildly at the dance of death upon the walls. No, no, said Jilly, it is fitting, now, to wait for the end, the ordained end. Her language had taken on a Biblical colouring which had certainly not been apparent at Garfield: where had it come from? Some childhood scripture class, some folk memory, some mass dementia of yesteryear? How the rubbish does linger, thought Alix to herself, as her voice reasoned with Jilly, as she tried to ascertain why Jilly had summoned her.

  ‘I wanted a witness,’ was Jilly’s reply to this line of query.

  ‘A witness to what? To the fact that you are sitting in this dump asking for trouble? Because that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? Asking for trouble?’

  Jilly nodded, as her candle guttered.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said.

  ‘Look,’ said Alix, suddenly changing tack, suddenly thinking of a new light, remembering Liz’s view that this was not necessarily a hopeless case, ‘look, why don’t you see a doctor? A proper doctor? Somebody you can get on with? Are you still seeing anyone from Garfield?’

  It appeared not. Alix wondered if Liz would see Jilly, if she could get Jilly referred to Liz: it gave her some hope, this thought, it gave her the energy to say she, Alix, must now get out, must go, must be on her way. Jilly accepted her departure: it’s better you go, she said, before the others get here. They don’t like me to see people from outside.

  ‘What others?’

  Jilly was vague. The others, she repeated.

  ‘I think you need a proper, intelligent, sympathetic, interested doctor,’ said Alix. ‘It’s no good just giving in, like this. You were doing so well, at Garfield.’

  Jilly lit another candle, from the butt of the one that was dying. She lifted it and gazed steadily at Alix in its draught-flickering light.

  ‘Alix,’ she said sombrely, ‘there is no hope for me. I am embarked upon the eternal night. You know this quite well, and you understand it quite well. I asked you here because you understand. To bear witness.’

  ‘I think that’s rhetorical melodramatic, self-important rubbish,’ said Alix, ‘and it’s inconsistent, too, because in that Christmas letter you wrote to me you were going on about the light shining for ever in eternal glory, not about the eternal night. You are also, I think, mixing your metaphors. Have I entirely wasted my time, trying to teach you the study of English language and literature and the techniques of practical criticism?’

  Jilly continued to gaze steadily at Alix, with a small smile now gathering round her lips.

  ‘I suppose you think I’m off my rocker,’ said Jilly.

  Alix nodded, patiently, agreeably.

  ‘Well, I think you are off yours,’ said Jilly. ‘I think you’re mad. You’re mad to have come here, for one thing.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Alix, ‘I suppose you could quite reasonably speak of embarking on eternal night. The image would be of a little boat upon the river of death? Or do you see it more as a sea? Setting off to sea?’

  ‘You see,’ said Jilly. ‘Mad, quite mad.’

  ‘And now I remember, you did say evil and good are one, so I suppose light and darkness might be one. So I take it back, about the inconsistency. But I still think it’s melodramatic rubbish.’

  ‘I think you’d better go,’ said Jilly. ‘I should never have let you come here. And anyway, as you see, I am quite all right.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Alix, picking her way carefully back along the dark corridor towards the front door, ‘Yes, marvellous, I’ve never seen anyone more comfortably installed.’

  Jilly laughed. ‘Alix,’ she said, ‘you are mad, but you are wonderful.’

  She unlatched the door, opened it. The light of the street lamp illuminated both their faces. And Alix had the impression that other faces appeared at upper windows of Number 43. The dull beat of blood seemed louder, in the open air.

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Jilly. ‘Goodbye for ever.’

  ‘I don’t like all this terminal talk,’ said Alix. ‘I think it’s very pretentious.’

  ‘This is rather a pretentious location,’ said Jilly, gazing down the desolate street. ‘It’s well chosen, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes, it is well chosen. I congratulate you.’

  ‘Remember me,’ said Jilly, as she laid a thin hand on Alix’s sleeve. A gust of wind blew out the flame of the candle.

  The two women embraced. The smell of Jilly’s skin was acrid, sour. She was dry as a leaf.

  Alix turned, and walked away, towards the corner, beyond which her car waited. Jilly watched her departure, and others watched too. Alix rounded the corner, and saw the Renault: she had the impression that somebody ran away from it, into the night, she felt that she half-overheard a sound of laughter. A scurrying, a whispering, a taunting. Rat-faced people, fox-faced people. She held onto her keys, tight in her pocket; the metal bit into her fingers, comforting. Her getaway keys. She knew she was being watched from every side. She reached the car door, opened the car, collapsed into the safety of the driver’s seat. But collapsed too far, too unevenly: something was wrong. Sh
e got out to look: the two front tyres had gone, they were as flat as the tyres of the old dumped car that had resided for so many months outside the house in Wandsworth. ‘Shit,’ said Alix, aloud, loudly. She knew without looking that they had been slashed. She heard laughter, girlish laughter, in the shadows, behind a wall. ‘Very funny,’ called Alix, thinly, defiantly, in the empty air. Her words vanished. Alix was angry, frightened, dismayed. Calmly she abstracted her briefcase, her shopping bag (Cumberland sausage for supper, from Jermyn Street) locked the car, and began to walk, calmly, carefully, indifferently, down the gauntlet of the street, then faster, as she reached Mortuary Road, and faster still, once out of sight of those mocking eyes, until she broke weakly into a jog on the last stretch. There was the main road, the Harrow Road. It was only five minutes from here to Esther’s: in the dark night, Alix Bowen ran, without looking behind her, not daring to look back.

  ‘Pierced hearts and severed heads and floating eyes?’ asked Esther, pouring Alix another large whisky.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Alix. ‘And a floating breast.’

  ‘Saint Agatha, that one,’ said Esther. ‘I wonder if it was meant?’

  ‘Well, what does Saint Agatha mean, come to that?’ asked Alix.

  ‘A good point,’ said Esther. ‘I must say, considered historically which by me it rarely is, the sado-masochistic content of Christian iconography is really rather startling. Here, have a look at this . . .,’ and she delved in a pile of art books, and came up with Painting in Naples: from Caravaggio to Giordano, which she passed to Alix, open at Guarino’s Saint Agatha. The saint suggestively clutched to her concealed but mutilated bosom a blood-stained white cloth, and her face wore an expression of ecstatic dreamy erotic intensity.

  ‘I forget if you went to that exhibition?’ said Esther. ‘I know I kept telling you to go, but I bet you never got round to it. You didn’t? I thought not. Liz went. Liz said that picture was menstrual. I don’t quite see what she means, do you?’

  ‘The red and the white?’ suggested Alix, tentatively, gazing at Agatha’s voluptuous disarray.

  ‘I must say,’ said Alix, ‘the paintings in Lykewake Gardens were rather less oblique. They were more like the paintings by that chap in Broadmoor who murdered his mother.’

  ‘Look,’ said Esther, momentarily distracted, turning the pages, ‘Look at this wonderful St Mary of Egypt. The bread and the skull. Brown, brown. Look at the texture. Wonderful.’

  ‘Were they all psychotic, the Neapolitans?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re not my lot, really. I asked Liz what it meant, this severed head business, and she just said it was something to do with fear of castration. Or rather, to do her justice, she said she thought that that was what a proper Freudian would say.’

  ‘I can’t possibly ring the AA,’ said Alix. ‘Not twice in a month. They’ll think I’m dotty.’

  ‘And did you say floating wounds? That’s what that chap in Broadmoor painted. Great bleeding wounds, floating around all by themselves.’

  ‘Didn’t Crivelli paint wounds?’

  ‘All sacred art is full of wounds. But yes, he did. You’re quite right. Very odd ones.’ Esther heaved around amongst various other large volumes, and abstracted her own Crivelli catalogue. ‘Is this the kind of thing you mean?’

  She pointed at a Pietà, where the incision in Christ’s bosom resembled a little open mouth, with lips; a little mouth, about to speak. Or a vagina. Yes, decided Alix, it more closely resembled a vagina. A wounded vagina, about to speak. Vagina implorans.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alix. ‘Pretty odd, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Esther.

  Alix gulped at her whisky.

  ‘I can’t ring the AA now anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ve had too much to drink. It’ll just have to stay there until the morning. I wonder if Brian wanted to go to Milton Keynes in it tomorrow? He’s got an examiners’ meeting.’

  ‘Give him a ring,’ said Esther.

  ‘And I’ll have to buy another spare. Oh God,’ said Alix. (‘Forty pounds,’ thought Alix.)

  ‘Tell me more about the cockatrice,’ said Esther, turning the pages of Crivelli, pausing before a Madonna of the Passion, where a brave cock crowed proudly, aloft on a marble pillar.

  ‘I suppose a cockatrice is a male-female symbol?’ said Alix. ‘But I’d have thought it was a dead symbol. As dead as the proverbial door-nail. I’m amazed by the way people keep on with the same old vestigial stuff. It dies hard.’

  ‘You would have expected us to have marched forward into the new light by now? The rational, radiant light?’ asked Esther.

  ‘Well, yes, I would,’ said Alix. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose even I would have expected a little better,’ said Esther. ‘A little more light.’ She sighed.

  ‘Tell me about Bologna,’ said Alix.

  ‘Ah, Bologna,’ said Esther. ‘Well, that was radiant, in its way. But I paid the price. Look, look at my palm. My poor palm. It missed me.’

  ‘Not too well, is it?’

  ‘Not really. It didn’t like my being away at all. It’ll have to go, soon. I keep hoping it might put out some final exotic expiring blossom. But I don’t think it will, now. Do you?’

  The palm stood stiffly to attention, rigid in death.

  ‘No,’ said Alix. ‘I don’t.’

  Alix left the Cumberland sausage at Esther’s. She also had to wait three quarters of an hour for a bus. She stood there, inventing stories to tell Brian about the car, inventing excuses, like a guilty wife.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Brian, ‘Never mind. What a horrid day you’ve had.’ He stirred the scrambled eggs, the ideal husband.

  ‘I’ll collect it tomorrow, at lunch time,’ said Alix. ‘I’m not going there in the dark again. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I’d have gone on the train anyway,’ said Brian.

  ‘And with the poor car out of action for so long over Christmas,’ said Alix, miserably, a little drunk still from Esther’s Scotch. She had confessed to one tyre only.

  ‘That wasn’t your fault either,’ said Brian, reasonably, distributing eggs on buttered toast.

  ‘No, no,’ said Alix even more miserably, vehemently, hopelessly, ‘it wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been my fault, it wasn’t my fault, it was the fault of other people. Wanton, idle, pointless, awful people. Deliberate. Malicious. The fault of the people.’

  ‘Now then,’ said Brian. ‘Come and eat your eggs. It’ll all be all right tomorrow.’

  But at lunch time the next day, as Alix Bowen and Polly Piper, armed with a spare tyre and some sandwiches, approached Lykewake Gardens in a taxi, they could see from afar that it was not all right. The road was full of police, cordoned off: disaster, quiet, drab, uniformed, muttering disaster called quietly down the shabby street through the cold air. Alix’s heart lurched, sank: ‘I knew it,’ she said to Polly, ‘I knew it.’

  The taxi driver slowed, stopped, some twenty yards from the cordon: sensing trouble, he was caught between the desire to see more and the desire to retreat. He turned round, questioningly, to his women passengers, who earlier had taken rather ill his jollity about the spare tyre, and who were now gazing ahead, transfixed. ‘Do you want to get away?’ he said, in a not unhelpful manner (for they were, after all, his fares, and under his protection) but it was too late to retreat, for the police had sighted them, were upon them, in a little cluster.

  Alix got out of the cab, gestured at her car, standing beyond the cordon, explained: yes, that was her car, with the two flat tyres; yes, she had come to fix it, to pick it up, with her friend Miss Piper; yes, it had been parked there all night. Polly paid the driver, but he hung around almost, as it were, against his will, allowing himself to be sucked into the vortex of danger. Questions came at Alix from all sides. She tried to walk towards the Renault, but was restrained: someone asked her for the keys, she declined to hand them over. What is all this, demanded Polly, magisterially, dauntingly, but she was
not answered. The car itself, they could now see, was the object of attention, the fatal attraction, the source of the shifting and mumbling and staring: Polly, put on her mettle by the confused officers, attempted to stride towards the Renault, speaking as she did so of the Home Office, but they called after her in horror, they interposed themselves and restrained her: don’t, Miss, don’t go near, they cried, with such conviction that even Polly faltered. ‘What is it? Is it wired for a bomb?’ she demanded: but Alix knew already that it was not a bomb. She knew that there, in her car, was the head of Jilly Fox.

  And so, of course, it was. Well, obviously, as Alix later conceded. The configuration of the street, the hard white January light, the police vans, the disorganized officers, the faces staring from upstairs windows, the air of subdued horror and illicit excitement: what else could it mean? Where else had the narrative of the previous tea-less tea time been tending?

  No, not a bomb, said one of the policemen. A head, a human head.

  Is that what he said? Neither Polly nor Alix could, later, be certain, but both remembered clearly that at some point (at roughly this point?) Alix was heard to declare, ‘I know whose it is,’ and Polly was heard to say ‘Shut up and ask for your solicitor.’

  Both agreed, later, that this was the most incriminating remark Polly could, in the circumstances, have uttered: but both agreed that, in the circumstances, it was hard to think clearly, even though trained by a Cambridge degree to do so at all times.

  Nobody seemed to be thinking very clearly: nobody seemed to be in charge. The discovery, whatever it was, was new: the situation was as yet fluid, unresolved. Alix continued to repeat that it was her car, but that she wouldn’t hand over the keys until somebody explained what was happening: gradually she edged her way up the road towards it, step by step, one or two of the reluctant officers shuffling along with her. ‘Surely I can look inside my own car?’ Alix heard herself saying, plaintively, innocently: and at this moment the group’s attention was distracted by the arrival of a newer, darker, smoother, superior official vehicle, and Alix took the opportunity of crossing the last two or three yards to look inside the Renault. Polly had flinched and fallen behind: Alix found herself curiously fearless. And there, indeed, reposing upon the driver’s seat, loosely wrapped but only partially concealed, in a piece of mutton cloth, was the head of Jilly Fox. The eyes were open, and stared. Alix gazed at them, at Jilly’s livid face, at the dishevelled hair. So this was it: death. Alix stared, and was not turned to stone. Her lips moved, drily. Goodbye, Jilly, said Alix Bowen, standing there on the cold pavement. Goodbye. A policeman, a young bearded policeman, stood silent in a shocked respect at her elbow, too shocked to interrupt this brief obsequy. And when Alix Bowen turned back to the living, turned back to Polly Piper, it was Polly who appeared to have been petrified, Polly who, at one remove, through the shield of knowledge of Alix, stood there pale and frozen, aged and motionless, appalled and death blasted.