The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘It’s all right, Polly,’ Alix is alleged to have said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s all right.’ Although, clearly, it was not.

  For ages of time they stood there, in the cold, dull white noonday glare, transfixed. Nothing moved. Far down the street, the taxi driver stood by his cab. Faces watched from windows. A young woman with a push chair and baby stood motionless, outside Number 18, arrested by her own front path, unable to proceed with her day’s shopping. Polly stood like a statue, in her leather coat and boots, in her fur hat. The young policeman stood, uncertain. A cold frame held them.

  And then, suddenly, there was action. A man who appeared to possess authority descended upon Alix and Polly, full of questions, assurances, respects: meekly Alix, recognizing hierarchy, handed over the keys, told her story of the previous day. Yes, she could identify the victim. Yes, she knew her well. Yes, she had seen her alive the day before. Where? Here in Lykewake Gardens. Which number? Could she tell them precisely where, when, why? Polly again suggested caution, spoke of solicitors, but Alix, armoured by innocence, shook off these warnings. It occurred to Alix that the body of Jilly Fox had not yet been located. Was the body of Jilly Fox lying, even now, in 43 Lykewake Gardens? Should she lead them to it?

  ‘Number 43, it’s just round the corner,’ she heard herself saying. ‘No, I don’t know who lives there. I think it’s some kind of squat.’

  The man in authority suggested that Alix and Polly should sit in his car, out of the cold, while he went to look at the house. Polly said she had to get back to work, but he indicated that this might not be possible. Polly asked if she could ring the Home Office to let it know where she was. Alix smiled at this, suspecting that the Home Office had little interest in the whereabouts either of herself or of Polly Piper, and that some of it might be surprised to learn that they still existed. To whom would you wish to speak? asked the man. Polly named the most important person she could think of, and was told she could speak from the car radio. ‘Harry,’ Alix heard Polly say, ‘Harry, this is me, Polly. What? Yes, me.’ (Intimacy established.) ‘No, I’m in the back of a police car. I won’t be back in the office this afternoon. What? No, I can’t tell you now. I’ll speak to you later. I’m with. . .,’ she consulted through the car window, ‘Chief Inspector Nicholls. And my colleague Alix Bowen. Yes, I’ll ring you this evening. Bye for now.’

  Chief Inspector Nicholls appeared suitably impressed by this interchange. He departed, assuring them he would be back soon. And he was: looking, Alix fancied, a little grim round the mouth, and rather important. He had, she imagined, just seen the rest of Jilly Fox.

  Alix spent the rest of the day helping the police with their enquiries. Polly was allowed to leave after a couple of hours: indeed, she was obliged to leave, somewhat against her will. She said she wanted to stay with Alix, but was discouraged from doing so. She left, sweeping out of the police station in a cloud of voluble reassurance: now she had recovered from the initial shock, she was thoroughly enjoying herself, as Alix had known she would. She even had the presence of mind to carry off the spare tyre. ‘I don’t suppose it’s needed as evidence, is it?’ she said, as she reclaimed it. ‘I’ll keep it for you, Alix. God knows when you’ll get your car back. Don’t worry, I’ll ring Brian as soon as he gets back from Milton Keynes. I’ll tell him all.’

  And she vanished, the tyre under her leather-jacketed arm, like an instrument of torture robustly carried by a healthy saint.

  Alix continued to make statements, give names, addresses, telephone numbers. The admonitory presence of the crudely invoked Sir Harry Hoggett hovered over her interviews, protectively, and she was treated with courtesy: chauvinistic courtesy, but courtesy nonetheless. After a while, as she began to realize the possible implications of publicity in the press about her post-Garfield relationship with Jilly, she began to wish she had followed Polly’s advice and asked for her solicitor, but it seemed too late in the day to demand to speak to her now. The day wore on, punctuated by cups of tea. Alix’s mind wandered. Severed heads, floating wounds, teeth in pincers, cockatrices. Why did she not grieve, at the horror of Jilly’s death? Because Jilly had willed it so. A martyr, she had become, and had died serenely. But a martyr to what? To what?

  Alix was cross-questioned about the slashed tyres. Yes, she had thought she had heard noises, giggling, scuffling, as she approached her car the night before. Girls’ voices?

  Alix hesitated. Yes, she had thought so. But should she say so?

  ‘I can’t be sure,’ she said.

  Why had she parked so far from the house, they wanted to know. I don’t know, she had said – some kind of caution, perhaps? So what had she been expecting to happen? Oh, she didn’t know. But in an area like that. . . . What did she know of the area? What were Jilly’s contacts in the area? Had Jilly mentioned any names?

  On and on it went, with long and tedious intervals. The Horror of Harrow Road strikes again, the headlines would declare. The second attempt in a month. Alix could not remember who the first of this second series, the pre-Christmas victim, had been.

  They had been girls’ voices, Alix was almost certain. But girls could hardly have hacked off Jilly Fox’s head? (Could? Would?)

  Bizarre, ironic, yet not quite coincidental, that she should find herself here, contemplating the nature of female crime and female contributory negligence, subjects so central to the professional concerns of herself and Polly Piper. They had been drawn to the scene of crime as by a lodestar. Had Jilly Fox asked to be murdered? Well, yes, obviously, but we must not say so.

  Alix recalled the dark street, the whisperings, the scuttling. Criminals and victims. Painful, painful. I am in danger of submitting, thought Alix, to the ‘moral panic’ which Adler was accused of evoking when she proposed (Sisters in Crime, 1975) the emergence of a new kind of female criminal, the production of the feminist movement of the 1970s. With what dangerous delight feminist sociologists have turned their attention to these things. What was that study of a female gang in New York that Polly had recommended so warmly? College girls and corner girls. Were she and Polly guilty of admiration for the criminal? for the streetwise, the cunning, the careless, the brave? Why else had she herself, Alix Bowen, Cambridge graduate, found herself in Lykewake Gardens off the Harrow Road? She had chosen to implicate herself, as surely as Jilly Fox had chosen to meet a violent death.

  Alix, sipping strong tea, tried to fix her mind upon the image of that woman with her baby, emerging from their hallway in Lykewake Gardens. A young black woman, wearing a long grey cloth coat, and a woollen hat: a nylon net, plastic-handled shopping basket over her arm: her baby well wrapped and bonneted, sitting in a chipped blue old-fashioned push-chair. An ordinary woman, an ordinary baby. Not well off, or why would they live in such a dump, but warmly dressed, respectably dressed, against the cold: and the brickwork of their house painted quite smartly, albeit in a somewhat violent deep salmon-pink. 1867, it said, on a cheap plaster flourish over the doorway. A home, a private place. No painted monsters, no gnawing rats. Once, thought Alix, I had a sense of such lives, of such peaceable, ordinary, daily lives. I could envisage interiors, clothes drying on fireguards, pots of tea in the hearth, a pot plant on a window-sill. Now I see them no more. I see horrors. I imagine horrors. I have courted horrors, and they have come to greet me. Whereas I had wished not to court them, but to exorcize them. To gaze into their eyes and destroy them by my gazing. They have won, they have destroyed me. There is no hope of a peaceable life, of a life for the people, of a society without fear. Fear grows, flourishes, is bred, blossoms, flames. That woman and her baby, they pause for ever on their front step. The street will destroy them

  I am defeated, thought Alix. We are defeated. But how can I admit defeat? Is it the wrong battle I have been fighting, all these years?

  Chief Inspector Nicholls returned, in the late afternoon, to ask Alix if she would object to accompanying him to the hospital mortuary to give a formal identification of the remains of Jilly Fox. I’m
sorry, Mrs Bowen, he said, but if you could come along now, I could let you go home. We haven’t been able to contact the parents. It seems they’re abroad. On an off-season package holiday to Marrakesh.

  Of course, said Alix, unable by nature and nurture not to sound obliging. A world of normality, Nicholls offered, in comparison with her own thoughts. They sat together in the back of the car, and Nicholls explained that the Coroner’s mortuary was closed, for its biennial clean: therefore they were to go to St Andrew’s Hospital. They chatted, as they passed through the dark streets. There were the Standard placards. ‘HORROR VICTIM IN DUMPED CAR’. Got that a bit wrong as usual, said Nicholls. I needn’t urge you to discretion with the press, Mrs Bowen, said Nicholls. No, said Alix, after all, I am a civil servant. Well, a sort of civil servant.

  ‘When will I get my car back?’ asked Alix, as they pulled up outside St Andrew’s. ‘My husband will be annoyed. I hardly dare to tell him.’

  It was a joke. He laughed. Polly Piper, Alix reflected, would not have descended to such a joke. Polly Piper was probably even now making different jokes, modern, murderous jokes, while drinking whisky and soda with Sir Harry Hoggett at their club in Pall Mall.

  The hospital was old, red-brick, Victorian. They walked along corridors, descended in a creaking old-fashioned metal-grid-doored service lift. They walked along more corridors. Doors opened. ‘Hello, Stanley,’ said Chief Inspector Nicholls to an elderly nicotine-moustached man in a white coat. Stanley looked suspiciously at Alix. ‘One of the bereaved,’ said Nicholls. In code Stanley nodded, ushered them into another smaller, cubicle room. Dark-blue Dralon drapes hung across the end of the cubicle. A young man wearing a hastily donned black tie over a hastily buttoned plaid Viyella shirt hovered, nervously. Alix caught his eye: he looked away, embarrassed. He looked rather ill. He somewhat resembled Alan Headleand. Alix half expected music, but there was none. In the nineteenth century, she told herself sternly, people used to go and gape at the victims in the Paris morgue. English gentlemen, English poets, English novelists went on purpose to stare. Géricault collected heads from the guillotine, took them back to his studio to paint, or so Esther had claimed. Who was she to flinch? And anyway, she had seen the worst already: Jilly’s head, yellow-white, staring, handsome, livid, wrapped in grey muslin, mystic, wonderful.

  ‘Ready, Mike?’ asked Stanley, hovering officiously. Mike nodded. ‘Ready, madam?’ Stanley enquired, rather unpleasantly, of Alix. Alix nodded.

  The Dralon curtains swished back to something of an anti-climax: there lay a recumbent form, but it was covered with a sheet, and a delicate white serviette lay over its head. Stanley nodded at Mike: Mike gently removed the serviette. And there again was the head of Jilly Fox, her eyes now decorously closed. The pallor was remarkable; its greenish-yellow hue and texture unreal, like wax. Mike looked very unhappy. The snake-like tresses had been combed into neatness: had poor Mike been obliged to comb them himself? Had his fingers closed those accusing ecstatic eyes? Alix knew Mike, instantly, for what he was: a college boy, doing his stretch as a corner boy. Earning money, toughening his spirit. She wanted to speak to him. She wanted to touch Jilly. She wanted Stanley to make the crude, comforting jokes she knew he would have been making had she not been there. She did not have the courage to ask if she could touch Jilly. Instead, she found herself, for the first time in her life, crossing herself – the wrong way, probably, if there was a wrong way for such a gesture. The Black Mass way? Stanley, Mike and Nicholls stood back respectfully, but somehow suspiciously. Alix gazed at Jilly, as though she were a finished work of art. She nodded authentication. Yes, she asserted, this was, or had been, Jilly Fox. She searched in her mind for a farewell, for an epitaph. For words, any words. For flights of wordy angels, to sing her to her rest. There lay Jilly Fox, with her three A levels, upon a mortuary slab.

  Nicholls cleared his throat. Stanley nodded at Mike. Apprentice Mike stepped forward to cover her face, but Alix stepped forward too, and without asking permission, gently touched Jilly’s icy forehead. Icy? Yes, icy. She had clearly just come out of a refrigerator. A refrigerator chest, with shelves, Alix imagined. Stanley, Mike and Nicholls closed in on Alix. Alix stepped back, deferentially. A ridiculous scene – the bruised much-fingered Dralon curtains, the black tie, the white coat, the serviette, the extraordinary blend of solemnity, menace and irreverence.

  ‘And what did they use,’ Alix heard herself saying, ‘to chop her head off? A Black and Decker?’

  But not even Alix’s indelicately correct guess at the instrument of decollation could convert her into a prime suspect. Or even a secondary or tertiary suspect. She was allowed to go home.

  The Jilly Fox episode put an end to Mike Gitting’s spell as a mortuary assistant. That very evening he told Stanley (of whom he had grown quite fond) that he had had enough of bits of bodies arriving in bin liners. BID. Brought in Dead. BIVD in this case, agreed Stanley, adding Longlife milk to his tea from the carton he kept in the mortuary refrigerator, but don’t let it put you off, Mike, these police cases are always unpleasant, it’s just a bit of bad luck they had to come in while you were here. It’s a good life, a secure life, let me tell you. You can get a diploma, make a career of it. No thanks, said Mike, who had already got a history degree from Sussex and was waiting for an interview with a provincial subsidiary of Global International Network. No, I don’t think so, really. I don’t think it’s quite me. But despite this prompt decision, Mike Gitting’s dreams were to be haunted for years to come. He had been educated at a Quaker school in York, and as a boy had been disturbed by descriptions of heads displayed above the city gates, displayed and left to rot, the hair falling away, the teeth bravely grinning at the weather: now they returned to grin at him. Heads, haunches, forequarters, set upon poles. No, no, no thank you, said Mike Gittings, tossing in his history-troubled sleep.

  ‘My God, poor Alix,’ said Liz Headleand, when Polly Piper rang to tell her the exciting news. But she reflected, shortly after, as she tried to ring Esther, that Alix of all people was unlikely to be deeply upset by such a ghastly event. Why? She wondered why.

  Otto Werner was not so confident. When he heard the story, guilt exaggerated his fears. The encounter had been of his making. What if Alix’s own head had been chopped off? What if he had unwittingly sent Alix to her death? What of the grief Alix must now be suffering? Did she blame Otto for this grief?

  No, Alix did not blame Otto. It did not occur to her to do so. Nor, as Liz had rightly guessed, was she apparently much disturbed by the more sensational aspects of Jilly’s death, or indeed much grieved by the death itself. It would have seemed to her a sentimentality, to grieve over so determined a departure. She was forced, over the next few months, to take a considerable interest in the case, as police questions continued, as various kinds of post-mortems took place – (on Jilly Fox’s body, on Alix’s friendship with Jilly, on Alix’s position at Garfield, on the mini-quango in Nightingale Terrace) – and she was overheard, at one point, to declare controversially, provocatively, that she felt very sorry for Jilly Fox’s murderer, who had been forced to play a role in a drama not of his own making. (His, sic.)

  Alix had lunch with Edgar Lintot, at Liz’s suggestion, and described her impressions of Jilly, and of the murals at Lykewake Gardens. No, she had agreed with Edgar, Jilly was not mad at all. But the man that murdered her, he is mad. Poor chap. Yes, poor chap, agreed Edgar. Interesting case, said Edgar. Yes, interesting, agreed Alix. I don’t think it can be very nice, to go around possessed of a compulsive urge to chop off people’s heads, said Alix, accepting another glass of wine. I entirely agree with you, said Edgar. Thus spoke the outdated voice of reason, in a small Greek restaurant just off Charlotte Street.

  The post-mortem on Alix’s marriage was less easy to conduct. The roles of victim and murderer were less easily allotted. Alix had no confidantes in this investigation: loyalty to Brian, to her own past self, to the whole network of the past, made it impossible for her to speak
, even to Liz, even to Esther. Because of this, she saw less of Esther and Liz at this time. Nor did she speak to Otto. She and Otto continued to meet, as before, in company. Nothing passed between them, save looks, glances, moments of consciousness. Nothing. Was it a consolation, occasionally to catch a glance, to clasp a hand on parting? Yes, perhaps.

  Difficult times. Brian did not get the job at Gloseley which Alix had almost begun to look upon as some kind of solution. Alix’s classes at Garfield were suspended, cut like the tablecloths, ostensibly for economy reasons. But, in fact, as everyone quite well knew, suspended because of the Jilly Fox scandal. Alix was not surprised. Work at Nightingale Terrace ground slowly to a halt, as Polly prepared for her new life. Alix handed in her notice too. There was some talk of finding her a new job within the Home Office but nothing was offered. She and Polly sat at their desks with their feet on the table drinking coffee, talking endlessly of the Fox affair. Polly, unlike Alix, was obsessed with the murderer’s identity, and came up with some wild suggestions of well-known sexual perverts in high places, suggested by the one escaped victim’s allusion to a possible moustache. Alix, outclassed, scoffed. Thus they passed the time, unprofitably, in the spring of eighty-four.