Brian spent nearly all his spare time attending political meetings, supporting the miners. He collected money, distributed leaflets.
Alix watched images of the miners’ strike on television. She watched the police in their riot gear. She watched charging horses. She listened to miners’ wives speaking of solidarity. She heard the leader of the miners’ union speak of certain victory. She saw blazing cars, upturned vans. Alone, she sat and watched and listened, hour after hour. What was it she felt? A kind of terrible grinding disaffection. As though the plates of her mind were rubbing and grating against one another. Arthritically, incurably: an invisible, internal inflammation. If she sat still and did not let her mind move at all, the pain would ease, but as soon as she tried to think, to react to what she saw and heard, the pain would start up again. And yet (and this was where her mind would wince in protest, would tell her to be still) – and yet, Brian was right, of course he was right. The cause of all this pain, this grinding, this deep misery, was the economic system itself. This system under which she lived. There was no hope in it, so why did her common sense, her rational being, her education all scream out in protest against the folly of Brian’s newly wasted life? Against the vacuous pointlessness of the slogans of his new-found, moustached, thin-lipped, polytechnic chums? Because of her class background, no doubt, Brian’s chums would say. Did say. But she did not believe this.
Or if she did believe it, what then? Where should she go then? So sat Alix Bowen, and many thousands like her, as the year wore on, as she watched the grim images that filled her little screen, and heard the righteous voices of unreason in the terminal struggle of warring factions in her own land. Where was a voice to speak to her, for her, for England? Where was Cromwell, where Winstanley? Was the country done for, finished off, struggling and twitching in the last artificially prolonged struggles of old age?
The miners went on holidays by the Black Sea.
The miners pawned their wedding rings and their silver photo frames.
The miners ate well in soup kitchens, on food parcels from rich Marxists in the Home Counties.
The babies of miners suffered acute malnutrition.
Miners threw bricks through the windows of miners.
Miners were peaceful, home-loving folk who loved their old grannies.
Miners beat their wives.
The wives of miners stood bravely on picket lines.
What I can’t see, said Esther to Alix, is what any of this has got to do with you. Or with me. It’s simply not our problem. We didn’t make it, and that’s that. I’ve never met a miner, and I’m sure a miner wouldn’t want to meet me.
It’s not as simple as that, said Alix.
Alix and Brian were obliged, at last, to get rid of the old Renault 4. They did their best to keep it going: they patched it up, after the Lykewake Gardens episode, and it chugged gamely on for another few weeks, but then suffered another ignominious disaster. Brian, going down one morning, discovered that the passenger window had been shattered and the radio nicked. Oh dear, oh dear, said Alix. Her view was that thieves should not vandalize or steal from such evidently unfortunate old vehicles: they should go for the A reg. Brian would not give in easily, and he and Alix went off to the breaker’s yard in Stockwell where you could pick up spare parts for next to nothing. Alix gazed, saddened, admiring, as Brian clambered around the towering heaps of old scrapped cars, searching for his own car’s siblings. The weak spring sun shone on rust and chrome, on sodden upholstery and fractured glass, on weeds struggling from corners of brickwork, as Brian, agile, picked his way through the mechanical junk in search of a spare window. His failure to find one the right size depressed him. All the Renaults on the scrapheap were of a later model than his own. I give in, he said to Alix, wiping his hands on his grey trousers: we’ll have to get rid of it, it’s just not worth spending any more on it.
‘What shall we do with it?’ asked Alix, as they drove home. The thought of selling the car to the breakers for a tenner upset her. She had never gone in for whimsy about the car, had always thought people silly when they gave their cars pet names and talked of them as people, but nevertheless, she did not like the image of the car in the breaker’s yard, piled high amidst the corpses. She knew that Brian did not like the idea either, though they were both too sensitive to share this somewhat dubious emotion.
‘I’ll take care of it,’ said Brian, gallantly.
And they returned home in draughty silence, subdued, as their thoughts turned to the cost of replacement. The finances of the Bowens were not flourishing, their prospects were not bright.
Rita Ablewhite lay in a hospital bed, staring at the ceiling. Sometimes she muttered to herself. Sometimes, but not often, Shirley went to sit with her. The nurses said she understood more than she let on, and that if only she’d cooperate she’d be able to feed herself, dress herself, maybe even walk again. Rita Ablewhite did not, at this point, choose to cooperate. A most unsatisfactory position.
Deborah Manning died. She had lingered on longer than anyone had expected or hoped, but the end, Nicholas assured Alix, was not too bad. Was he saying this to protect her? Alix did not know. She went to the funeral, in the little church at the foot of the Downs. The leaves of the chestnut were unfolded. Broad green spring. There were bluebells in hedgerows. Ilse presided over the funeral party, the lady of the manor. With extraordinary grace. The gypsy, settled. Sam vanished into the garden, and lay gazing into the depths of the pond. Yellow irises rose, stately, festive. The bulrushes, according to Nicholas, were getting out of hand. He would cut them back now Deborah had gone. What is it, this grace, wondered Alix. Is it natural? Is it of nature? Is it a free gift? She remembered Sebastian, who had been destined to a life of ease. And she with her questions, her doubts, her difficulties, her withdrawals, had destroyed him. Thus she now read the plot of the past. She had not, it seemed, destroyed Nicholas. Not even her great love had destroyed him. She resolved to keep away, to stand out of his light, to let him be.
Esther Breuer’s palm died. She offered it painless euthanasia, by putting it out on the front steps one frosty night. She repented the next morning and took it in again, under the influence of the silent young man upstairs – well, not so young now, but she always thought of him as the silent young man. As he saw the palm on the steps upon leaving the house, he addressed to Esther perhaps the only complete sentence she had ever heard him utter in some thirteen years. ‘You’ll kill the poor thing,’ he said, ‘if you leave it out there.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ said Esther humbly, apologetic, ‘but it wasn’t really doing very well indoors. I thought I’d – I’d give it a change.’
And she put it back in her front window, but the deed was done, and its withering accelerated. Esther felt unaccountably guilty whenever she saw (which was not often) the silent young man.
She was not at all surprised to receive, a week after this exposure, a phone call from Elena in Bologna informing her that Claudio was ill in hospital and was asking to see her. I think you should come, said Elena.
So Esther went, responding to this last summons. She had never in all these years met Claudio’s wife, and did not necessarily expect to do so now: but wondered, nevertheless, as the Alitalia plane descended what she was really like? And what kind of tales, if any, he had related to her of his friendship with Esther Breuer? She had little doubt but that he had lied of each to the other: delicacy had prevented her from cross-questioning Elena too closely on this subject, but nevertheless she had gathered, indirectly, that the bitter hypochondriac Claudio described as his wife was as much a figment of his imagination as the werewolf. Roberta Volpe was patient, pleasant, mild, forebearing, Elena implied. She and Elena liked one another. As one normal person might like another. So Elena implied.
Esther thought of Claudio Volpe, who had been the great love of her life, and wondered what had happened to that love. Now she did not feel it any more, had it ceased to exist? Because she did not feel it any more, did that mean it had ne
ver existed? These thoughts tormented her. She had wasted her entire adult emotional life on a fantasy. On a werewolf. On a non-person. Was there any recovery? And how could she face the sight of the non-Claudio, the shell-Claudio, the real Claudio?
Esther Breuer was quite well aware of the fact that her emotional relationships throughout her life had been based partly on her desire to avoid normal sexual intercourse. She did not need someone like Liz Headleand to tell her this, nor would Liz ever have had the impertinence to suggest it. For both she and Liz knew that such knowledge was irrelevant. Nevertheless, Esther Breuer, approaching Claudio’s hospital bedside after a fortifying coffee with Elena, was obliged to pause, to take stock, to hesitate, on the polished linoleum: her blood sang in her ears. What was it that was relevant, what was this obsession that she had accepted, willed, encouraged?
Claudio lay there, yellow, shrunk, sharp, in a private room. Flowers, books, fruit, bottles of spirit surrounded his bedside. A crucifix hung on the wall. He looked up at her, sharply, as she entered. Sharply, fretfully. An old man, a sick old man. But she was relieved to sense that he was not yet harmless: from him emanated still a faint potency, an odour of malice. ‘Siediti,’ he instructed her, and she sat. ‘Ascolta,’ he said, and she listened.
He spoke of the soul, and its journey through time: of the material and the immaterial: of the spiritus mundi, the anima, the stella marina, the deus absconditus. He had been reading Jung, he said, Jung the old faker: but it was interesting, nevertheless, to look back at books he had admired as a boy: look up the Medusa, he said to her, look up the stella marina, the fish that burns like a star in the midst of water, the starfish that burns at the North Pole.
Esther listened, relieved. Relieved to find him as mad as ever, madder than ever. Finding him so, indeed sublimely so, even for him, she acknowledged that what she had most feared was to find a fretful, reduced, humbled old man, complaining about hospital food, stupid nurses, pain. But no, Claudio was far, far beyond and above all that, still encouraging himself with dreams of hidden power and forbidden knowledge. He spoke of Gorgon and the Medusa and Géricault and Demigorgon and Salome and the Bessi of Thrace. He spoke of a witch he had known in Sofia. He spoke of a fool of a Dominican priest who visited him every evening to talk theology. To entertain him, Esther told him the story of Jilly Fox and the cockatrice. He was entranced, as she had known he would be. It is not a mortal murderer, said Claudio, it is a spirit. It is a mass hallucination, unleashed from the fear of the people. By disbelief you can disarm it. If you decide so, Esther, there will be no more deaths.
I don’t see how I can undo a mass hallucination by single will, said Esther. Everybody else would have to join in.
You do not recognize your own power, said Claudio, solemnly. If you will it, there will be no more deaths.
Really, said Esther, gazing at the white lilies, the yellow roses, thinking that shortly she would ask Claudio to offer her a drink, and then she would run back to Elena’s for comfort, to laugh, to weep, to recover, in the outside world of health.
She was sipping a stiff gin and amaro when another visitor was announced. There was a tap on the door: it’s that imbecile of a priest, said Claudio, suspiciously, eagerly (she could tell he enjoyed his nightly confrontations), but it was not; it was a dark curly-haired, handsome Englishman bearing a potted orchid. Esther did not at first recognize him, so much out of context, so far from home, but he recognized her: ‘Esther Breuer, I think,’ he said, having greeted Claudio and deposited his orchid, and she saw that it was art historian and Minister for Sponsorship Robert Oxenholme.
‘Pour Robert a drink,’ Claudio instructed Esther, in English. He never sounded quite as plausible in English.
‘What are you having?’ asked Robert, inspecting Esther’s dark glass.
She told him.
‘I’ll have the same,’ he said.
And so they drank, and chatted: a little party, by the sick-bed. Esther felt she should make her escape, and leave the two men time together, although it was another half-hour before Elena would return from work, but Robert Oxenholme insisted on leaving as she left. They assured Claudio they would return another day, and left him to his crucifix and his priest. In the corridor, Robert Oxenholme took hold of Esther’s elbow. ‘I don’t like death,’ he said. ‘Come and have a drink. And anyway, I have things to say to you. Have you time?’
‘I don’t like death,’ he repeated, in a bar on the Via Castiglione. ‘But maybe Claudio is immortal. Have you been long in Bologna?’
Robert Oxenholme, it emerged, had come to Bologna principally to see Claudio. ‘To pay my last respects to the old fraud,’ said Robert, affectionately. ‘A great man, Claudio. In his way.’
‘Yes,’ said Esther.
‘And you, Esther – if so I may call you – what are you doing here?’
‘I am on a similar mission.’
‘Not working?’
‘Not really working. Though I thought I’d go and see Angellotti at the Institute tomorrow. And have a look at the Cossa. That kind of thing.’
‘Are you free for dinner?’
Esther laughed. ‘This is the kind of conversation I used to have in Italy when I was twenty-five,’ she said, in explanation. ‘No, I’m not free. I’m staying with Claudio’s sister Elena, as you must have gathered, and she’s expecting me home.’
‘Home,’ he echoed, playfully, wistfully.
‘You’re in a hotel?’
‘I spend half my life in hotels.’
‘How sad.’
‘Could you dine with me tomorrow?’
‘I don’t know.’ She hesitated, not sure if he was serious. ‘Perhaps Elena. . . .’
‘Might invite me home?’
She laughed, again. She asked where his home was, what his family was, why he travelled so much: surely you know people in Bologna, she told him, firmly, a man in your position knows people everywhere. I know Claudio’s wife Roberta, said Robert. She’s a very nice woman. But I can hardly impose on her at a time like this. Poor Robert, said Esther.
I heard you lecture once, said Robert. In the Royal Institute. It was one of the best lectures I’ve ever heard in my life.
Esther blinked, then hit back.
‘What was it on?’ she asked.
He told her, at some length, and quite accurately, what it had been on. She had spoken on the ideal Renaissance city in art and philosophy. An unusual subject, for her. She remembered it well. She had worked hard on it.
‘Did you ever publish it?’
She shook her head.
‘Why not? Why don’t you publish?’
Again she shook her head.
‘You waste your talents,’ he said. ‘You bury them in the ground instead of investing them.’
‘That’s what people say, these days,’ she said. ‘We all choose our own parables. And yours is in vogue at the moment.’
‘You prefer the parable of the sower? You prefer to cast your thoughts on stony ground?’
‘You heard me.’
‘And here I am again, fully sprouted. To tell you not to waste your talents. A full circle.’
‘And what would you advise?’
‘Something a little more ambitious, perhaps? Is it because you are a woman, that you lack ambition? Or because you despise money? Or because you don’t need money? Or because you despise your audience?’
‘I get along, after my own fashion,’ said Esther.
‘I wrote a book on Signorelli,’ said Robert Oxenholme. ‘Nobody asked me to, nobody paid me to do it, but I did it.’ He ordered another drink.
‘Yes,’ said Esther. ‘I read it.’
‘Well, more of a monograph than a book,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I don’t understand your attitude,’ he said. ‘You ought to want to publish. It’s very English, the way you don’t bother.’
‘I’m not exactly English,’ said Esther. ‘More Austrian-Jewish, to be precise. But go on, te
ll me what it is that I ought to be doing that I’m not doing. You have my attention.’
Robert Oxenholme explained to her what he thought she ought to be doing with her talents. She ought to be productive, ought to be ambitious, ought to commit herself to a lasting work. Esther pointed out that even the evening classes which she had taught had been taken away from her by cuts in public spending effected by the government he represented (an exaggeration, but he was not to know that) but he brushed this aside impatiently as an irrelevance: evening classes for old ladies, he said, a waste of time for someone with your record, your gifts. . . . No, she ought to be working on quite a different scale, as she knew quite well herself, and it wasn’t too late, there was time to make a lasting contribution to the world of scholarship, what right had she to disdain it? He grew eloquent. She was a loss to the nation, he suggested, a casualty of an education system that prized modesty above self-esteem, that encouraged dilettante dabbling, that scorned profit, achievement, success. He pulled out of his briefcase a guide to the Carracci frescoes of the Palazzo Magnani, issued by the Credito Romagnolo: there, you see, is the proper relationship of art and commerce, he said, as she leafed through it, looking at Romulus and Remus suckled by the she-wolf, at the happy Rape of the Sabine Women and Romulus Overcome by Pride. Here is twentieth-century patronage, enlightened patronage, art and industry hand in hand.
Yes, said Esther. Are you suggesting that I approach the Nat West or the Midland Bank for a grant to write a book on Crivelli?
He halted, drew breath, and repeated his invitation to dinner. ‘Ring your friend, tell her you won’t be back,’ he said. ‘I can make some interesting suggestions. Not the Nat West or the Midland, I agree, but some really interesting suggestions. . . .’
The Radiant Way Page 42