The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Sam cheered up when he saw the pudding: an excellent selection, pie and cream, trifle, a mousse. Sam had some of everything. Shirley smiled at him, with her first warm smile of the evening. ‘Yummy, really yummy,’ said Sam, reaching out his plate for more. Pudding-starved Sam.

  Celia nibbled, coldly. When interrogated by Alix she admitted that she was taking her A levels, and had already sat her Oxbridge. Yes, she had been offered a conditional place. To read History and Ancient History. Yes, she was pleased about this, as her school had been discouraging about the chances of its girls, suddenly forced to sit Oxbridge in the fourth term. Alix longed to know more about this, to know what Shirley and Cliff and Celia thought of the fourth-term Oxbridge ruling, but she dared not pursue the topic: it was nothing if not political.

  So Celia would have a year off, between school and university?

  ‘No,’ said Celia, primly. Her docility was sinister. She can’t wait to get out, thought Alix. Her two brothers had already vanished, one to London, one to Australia. Celia was the family’s white hope. She could not wait to leave the family. And she was, as she conveyed in the menacing crossing of her ankles, only a girl.

  Over coffee, coffee made in an electric machine the like of which Alix had never seen, her mind drifted back to her own entrance examinations, to Flora Piercy’s room, to her year off. Her time as an au pair girl, her lonely nursing of a friendly French baby, her exhilaration at finding Liz and Esther again. Esther, during this time, had fallen in love with Italy. Liz had sat at home, here in Northam, filled with expectations, great expectations. Alix had done nothing much. Young she had been, and with her life before her.

  ‘Thank you for a lovely evening, Shirley,’ said Brian, politely, the true born gentleman, as they stood in the hallway, putting on coats and hats. He had got off lightly: nobody had mentioned Auntie Yvonne.

  Rita Ablewhite died that night, in her hospital bed. Quietly, politely, without a sound, she suffered a heart attack, and died.

  Liz rang Alix with the news. ‘I’m driving up this afternoon,’ she said.

  ‘Come and stay the night,’ said Alix.

  No, said Liz, she’d already booked herself into the Open Hearth Hotel, but could she come to supper? Of course, said Alix.

  ‘Dead,’ said Liz. ‘Yes, dead. At last. I can’t believe it.’

  But Charles was not listening. He had just received news that Dirk Davis had allegedly been executed by his captors. The news had flashed through on to his teletext when he was looking for something quite different. There the message had been, in flashing green teleprint. No confirmation as yet.

  ‘Dead,’ he echoed, to Liz’s statement. But he was not listening to what she said, as she rambled on over the phone.

  ‘Shirley hates me,’ said Liz, over her second whisky, to Alix and Brian. ‘She hates me. I don’t hate her, but she hates me.’

  ‘Well, so what?’ said Alix, robustly. ‘Why should sisters love one another?’

  ‘You like yours.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t see much of her, do I? Not much more than you see of Shirley. I wouldn’t like to have to live with her. Or even very near her, come to that.’

  ‘I’m frightened,’ said Liz. ‘I’m frightened, of that horrible house.’

  Rita Ablewhite was cremated, with the minimum of ceremony. Only her two daughters and Cliff and Celia Harper were in attendance. No hymns were sung, no music played.

  Liz took a week off work, to help Shirley sort out the house. She stayed, resolutely, in the hotel. Shirley seemed to respect this.

  They agreed on a plan of campaign. Together, they would search the house for a will, for any indication of communication with solicitors. If they failed to find anything, they would approach Cliff’s solicitors. ‘Not that I think they’re much good,’ said Shirley, ‘but at least they’re local.’

  Together, Liz and Shirley stood shivering in the front porch as Shirley turned the key: together they shivered in the damp hall. The house was very cold. It smelled deadly. A few circulars lay on the mat: Shirley picked them up. Shirley had been paying the bills: not much arrived for Rita Ablewhite.

  They felt awkward, incompetent. They had to break their way into the desk like thieves, with implements from Shirley’s car tool-kit. The nicely polished wood splintered, the lock gave.

  Shirley stared at the pigeon-holes full of scraps of paper and old envelopes. I kept trying to get up the courage to ask her if there was a will, but it seemed so – tactless,’ said Shirley. Liz laughed. Somehow, here in this house, things were not so bad between them. Laughter was possible, in extremis.

  ‘Right,’ said Liz. ‘You begin at that end, and I’ll begin at this.’

  They kept on their overcoats and scarves, despite the single-bar electric fire. It was the same electric fire that had warmed them in their girlhood. Before it Liz as a schoolgirl had dried her knickers, nearly forty years ago. The wiring was antiquated, the plug was of a rounded, round-pinned variety not often seen in the 1980s.

  Shirley found the will quite quickly. They went to make themselves a cup of coffee before they opened it.

  ‘The last will and testament of me, Rita Ablewhite, of 8 Abercorn Avenue Northam.’ It was dated 1949. The solicitors were her executors. It left everything, in so far as they could establish from a cursory examination, to her two daughters equally, with provision for grandchildren should the daughters predecease her. A proper will, a solicitor’s will. It revealed nothing. Liz and Shirley did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed. They looked at one another questioningly. Neither gave anything away.

  ‘I don’t suppose the house is worth much,’ said Shirley, after a while, ‘in the condition it’s in. But it’s better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick.’

  ‘It’s such a normal-looking will,’ said Liz, wonderingly.

  Both sisters sat there, fingering their silver lockets reflectively.

  They then returned to the desk, in an upsurge of energy. They emptied the pigeon-holes, threw old bills in waste-paper baskets, discarded thirty-year-old accounts with implausibly small totals from the fish shop, kept one or two more serious items – a Co-op Book, a Savings Account Book. Bored with the desk, they went upstairs, and started stuffing old clothes in black bags. Their father’s suits, preserved in moth balls. The Salvation Army would take them, said Shirley, and what wasn’t fit for them could go on the Council tip. Wildly, they packed and sorted. Laughing, at last exhilarated. A good day’s work.

  Just before leaving, Shirley returned to the question of the will. We ought to get in touch with her solicitors, she said. Enderby and Enderby. She tried to look them up in the telephone directory, but they seemed not to be there. ‘Oh dear,’ she said to Liz. ‘They’ve moved, or died, or something. What happens when solicitors disappear?’

  ‘Mm?’ said Liz, absently. She was not listening. She was crouching on the floor, over the open bottom drawers of the desk. Drawers stuffed with newspaper cuttings.

  ‘I said, how do we track down the solicitors?’

  Liz shut the drawer, and staggered stiffly to her feet: her head was spinning slightly. She was not as supple as she had been, could not crouch on her knees as easily as she had once done.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Liz. She was not focusing at all. She stood there, gaping at nothing.

  ‘That’s enough for today,’ said Shirley. ‘I’ve got to get home. I’ll have a go at tracking down the solicitors tomorrow, shall I?’

  ‘Yes, fine, yes, of course,’ said Liz.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Liz?’

  ‘Yes, yes, fine, I just feel a bit dizzy, that’s all. I stood up too suddenly.’

  Liz passed a hand across her brow.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she repeated, uncertainly. And then, a little more robustly, ‘Perhaps you could let me borrow the keys, Shirl? I could come along tomorrow and do a bit more sorting. You did say you had to stay at home tomorrow, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got
the plumber coming,’ said Shirley. ‘But I will try to get hold of the solicitors. Somebody must know what happened. Look, this is the front door key. It’s a bit stiff, and you don’t want to push it right in . . . not quite in, for some reason – try it – yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Liz on the cracked asphalt of the front path.

  And thus she made her rendezvous.

  The desk drawers and the bottom drawers of the wardrobe were stuffed with them. Newspaper cuttings, going back to the 1920s, the 1930s. Nothing very personal, no letters, no family photographs, mainly cuttings. Marked cuttings. Dated cuttings. From local papers, national papers. Mingled in with them were a few apparently random documents: school reports for Liz and Shirley, vaccination certificates. What am I looking for, wondered Liz, as she spread them before her on the floor. A marriage certificate or a death certificate? Some pre-Northam memory? A photograph of my father?

  Her heart was beating very loudly in the silent house, and the blood was singing in her ears. This was from her cramped position, she told herself.

  She remembered her mother, cutting up newspapers.

  Many of them related to the Royal Family. A harmless, a common obsession. There was a whole package connected with the Coronation of 1937, another packet documenting the Coronation of 1953. On the brown cover of the 1937 bundle her mother had written: ‘We were in London. It rained.’

  We? Who was we? Liz had been an infant, in 1937, and Shirley had not been born.

  A bundle in an old elastic band was stuffed with references to Dr Alethea Ward, who had endowed and named the Cambridge Scholarship which Liz had been awarded. A complete file, from Dr Ward’s obituary in the Northam Daily Telegraph onwards. She had died in 1935, the year of Liz’s birth, a fact of which Liz, in the deep selfishness of youth, had hitherto been oblivious. Alethea Ward had meant as little to her as the names of benefactors inscribed on benches in public parks. Yet here was Alethea’s life story, preserved and haphazardly, posthumously, updated. There was no hint of the nature of Rita Ablewhite’s interest in Alethea Ward.

  Rita also seemed to have been obsessed, less normally, by cases of sexual crimes against children. Liz, coming across these packages, had to force herself to look. The mess of paper jumped and swam before her eyes. One could make any story out of these fragments. Her mind jumped. And why had her mother, all those years ago, also been collecting newspaper cuttings about the Hestercombes and the Oxenholmes? Why were there so many newspaper photographs of Stocklinch Hall? Had it been there that Rita Ablewhite had toiled below stairs? One could rearrange these pieces as one wished, like the jigsaw scraps of an experimental novel. A man had killed himself in Stanhope Wood with a penknife, reported an item in the Evening Star. A man had been charged with the murder of a six-year-old girl. Suspicious behaviour on school premises. Claimed to be depressed because of operation. Committed an offence on the railway bridge. Sentence reduced on Appeal to three years. Suicide while of unsound mind. Found hanging in slaughterhouse, after police alerted neighbours. Stocklinch Hall to be opened to the public on Saturday afternoons. A Pleasant Day Out from Leeds. Van Dyck sold to pay for death duties. Attempted an offence in school bicycle shed.

  Liz staggered to her feet, walked up and down the room, lit a cigarette. Patience could assemble the parts, but Liz was not a patient woman. She walked up and down, up and down. Was there gathering, in the back of her mind, in the farthest reaches of her memory, an image, a recollection, a sensation? An overheard, uncomprehended conversation? She sank once more to her knees, opened more bundles of cuttings. Could the answer be here, simply, in one of these shabby packets?

  More suicides, more paedophiles. On balance, more suicide than murder, more minor offences than major offences. There was a chronological order, of a rudimentary sort. Liz tried to think, to reason. Her father had left – to join the Army, according to ill-defined family assumption – in 1940, had been killed abroad, again according to ill-defined family assumption, in 1944. She turned to the more likely cuttings. Any of these victims she could choose for her father. Any of these outcasts, these perverts, these penknife suicides. The story had a remorseless logic. It made narrative sense. Of the silence, the seclusion, of the barrier of secrecy, the fear that had possessed the daughters. Liz’s heart beat so wildly that she wondered if she was about to die. Keep calm, she told herself, keep calm. She turned the yellowing scraps. Of her own infancy, she had hardly a recollection. In vain had her analyst Karl probed, offered suggestions, hypotheses. Before the age of four, nothing. Was this the explanation?

  She could not look. She leafed on, finding a harmless cutting, paperclipped on to a shot of the Marquis of Stocklinch and an article about Princess Margaret Rose and Crawfie: an advertisement for the good services of the friend of her mother’s one and only friend, Miss Featherstone, LRAM, ARCM, ALAM, ATCL, LGSM(Eloc.), MRST, authorized teacher of P. G. Waley’s System of Sinus Tone Production. Large Miss Featherstone, and the diminutive Miss Mynors. Yes, she remembered them.

  Liz stood up again, lit another cigarette. History, fact, memory, fantasy. Truth, belief, faith, delusion. She had spent her entire professional life attempting to investigate the relations of these concepts.

  She walked to the window, gazed down the cold February suburban street. The leafless trees stood against the dark sky.

  Her whole body was throbbing, thudding, beating: her head seemed about to split with the effort of recollection, of accommodation. How purposefully she had deceived, all those years ago, the innocent Karl. False clues she had offered him, she had knowingly misled him, half-hoping he would detect her falsities. And now the clues were all around her. The end of the thread was in her own hand.

  She could not follow. Breathing heavily, exhausted, she felt knowledge slip from her, she felt herself let go. She looked at the littered floor. What is the nature of the effort required of me? She spoke the words, aloud. They sounded in the empty house. If I knew what it was, I would make it, she said to herself, silently, in good faith.

  No, there would never be knowledge, there would only be fear, uncertainty, suspicion. Knowledge would be death. Liz’s breath came quickly, as she skirted revelation. Is it fear in me, is it necessary fear?

  A great sun was burning dully, in the back of her mind, just beyond vision.

  She knelt down again, started to turn over the pitiful records of pitiful lives. An impulse told her to burn them, to shove them in the Ideal Boiler as she had shoved the guilty secrets of her childhood, and set fire to the lot. Her skin was very hot. Shame? Guilt? She was very near these monsters: she could smell them in their caves, she could smell them in the cave of her own body.

  Liz crouched in a dark landscape, reading police news, reading of royalty. Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret Rose. Lord Filey of Foley, the Hon. Roy Oxenholme.

  I am exhausted, thought Liz. Defeated, she began to push the clippings back into their folders, into their envelopes: already the record was jumbled, already the pieces had strayed from sequence, inconsequentially. What did it matter who her father was? She opened the drawers, began to stuff the papers in again, at random. What does it matter who I am?

  She would leave, go back to the safety of the anonymous hotel, the hotel without history. To the plastic canework and carpeted lift. To the hotel with its forged, fake history.

  A life of drudgery, a life of concealment, a life of silence. A life sentence of silence.

  Liz picked up the wine cooler, fingered its silver monogram. She thought of Henrietta Latchett. A silver shine, a pewter shine.

  She wandered over to the bookshelf. Her mother’s books. The old favourites: Victorian novels, Edwardian novels. Penguin detective stories. A row of Liz’s own school prizes and textbooks. Children’s stories. School anthologies. Liz took one or two down, opened them, gazed at their once familiar inscriptions. And right at the end, pushed between two larger volumes, a slim volume, a children’s primer, limply bound. Liz held it in her hand, regarde
d it with a mild astonishment. The Radiant Way.

  She had no recollection of it, at first sight. She gazed intently at its jacket: two children, a boy and a girl, running gaily down (not up) a hill, against a background of radiant thirties sunburst. Charles had learned to read from this: had she too so learned, nearly half a century ago? It had been a popular pre-war title: were she and Charles bound by a common recollection? A Jungian recollection? And Charles had chosen the title for his series?

  She opened the book cautiously. Yes, there was her own name, inscribed in an unknown hand. Elizabeth Ablewhite. The Radiant Way, First Step, 1933. She turned the pages. Was she perhaps beginning to remember? Did she recognize these nice children? Pat and Ann. Pat, Ann and Mother. Sing, Mother, sing. Mother can sing. Sing to Mother, Ann. Pat has a cod. Ann has a fan. The illustrations were evocative: fuzzily tinted, delphinium-towered, holly-hock-adorned herbaceous borders round a vast middle-class lawn, Mother sitting young and decorous in an armchair reading, with a glass-fronted bookcase, a fringed standard lamp. Mother kisses the children goodnight. Ann sits in bed with a pug dog. Nursery simplicities, childhood idyll. And where was Father? Ah, there he was, coming home from work in his belted overcoat, in his thirties jacket with its sharp lapels. Liz stared at the features of Father. Smooth, clean-cut, very slightly sinister. A bit of a con-man, Father. A weak con-man. No match for ever-present, smartly frocked, even-smiling, competent Mother. A shadowy figure, Father. He appeared in only three sequences: Coming Home, On the Train, and The Picnic.

  Father. Yes, she had sat upon her father’s knee, learning to read from this very book. She had rubbed herself like a kitten up and down, sitting astride her child-molester father’s knee. Spelling out words to Father. Enjoying the coarse fabric of his trousers. Enjoying his illicit smell. Giggling as he tickled her and played with her. Damp between her innocent infant’s legs.