The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  Guilt. Shame. Infantile sexuality. Liz gazed at the white-ankle-socked children, in their sunny, monosyllabic garden. The children in the garden. The serpent hissed, sweetly. The children aged, slowly. They skipped downhill for ever, along the radiant way, and behind them burned for ever that great dark dull sun. Liz shook her head, slowly, smiled to herself, slowly. It was beautiful, it was necessary, she said to herself. She touched her locket, she laid her fingers on the images in the book. She had been very near to knowledge. She would go no further, today: she would nurse her strength, for the next encounter.

  She needed strength that evening, when Charles rang. Charles was in a state of near hysteria. He had been informed that the terrorist group had executed Dirk Davis, and thrown a video cassette of the event over the British Embassy gate. It purported to show Dirk Davis standing against a wall, blindfolded: Dirk Davis being shot by two masked gunmen: Dirk Davis’s body lying twitching, then inert, at the foot of the wall.

  ‘Christ, how ghastly,’ said Liz, sympathetically. ‘Whatever did they do it for?’ Charles did not know: why did anyone ever do such things? They were making some crazy demands about release of terrorists in Israeli jails: nothing to do with Britain at all, Charles said. Liz didn’t know what to say to calm him down, didn’t know how to point out that Dirk Davis’s death was nothing to do with Charles either. Because she knew Charles felt it was. And maybe, to do him justice, all telejournalists felt themselves to be implicated by this death: comradely sorrow?

  What haunted Charles most, she could tell, was the notion of the video. Death by technology. Death by the new Do-It-Yourself News programme. Death over the teletext. Perhaps Charles was culpable. He had loved these things, was still obsessed by dish receivers. He had envisaged a world in which people, whenever they chose, could receive real moving pictures of the deaths of old comrades. All over the world. Perhaps it served Charles right.

  Charles walked up and down the only large room of his flat in Kentish Town, gesticulating nervously to himself, talking to himself. Perhaps the video was a fake. Henry Adamson, who had seen it, said it could conceivably be a fake. Charles felt sick, because he knew that he could not rest until he had seen the video, until he had witnessed the shooting of Dirk Davis. Until he had authenticated, for himself, the dead body of Dirk Davis. Until he had seen Dirk Davis die a violent death, and lie twitching at the bottom of a brick wall. And not once, but again, and again, and again, and again. He was doomed to watch, again and again and again. Enslaved by death. Hooked on death. Again, and again, and again. The car park in Acton, the brick wall in Baldai. Again, and again, and again.

  Liz Headleand woke at five in the morning, in the Open Hearth Hotel, feeling ill. Shaking with psychic fever, with a blinding headache. She took a couple of Panadol, and waited for dawn. There was nothing to do but to sweat it out.

  She was too ill to get up. She drank a cup of tea, declined medical assistance. She lay and sweated. Fruit was brought to her, and toast. The day passed. Shirley called, for the keys to Abercorn Avenue. Liz lay, speechless, hot, shading her eyes with her hand. Shirley tried to explain that she was on the track of the solicitors, but Liz would not listen. Not now, she whispered, not now.

  For twenty-four hours she lay there, as memory worked its way through her body. Dimly she remembered her calm of the day before, when confronted with the evidence. Why had she not been more shocked then? In self-protection, no doubt. A well-known trick. Now was the day of reckoning. A lifetime of memory, in a day. How can one know and not know, simultaneously? How often had she asked herself this simple question, when unknotting the tangled threads of the memories of others? How can the utterly unexpected be the same as the expected? How can it be?

  Repression. Trauma. The skeleton in the cupboard. Something nasty in the woodshed. A classic case. A banal case. No wonder I feel so rotten, said Liz to herself, rousing herself at the end of the day to watch the ten o’clock news. The shock was subsiding, the fever abating. So Dirk Davis was dead, and Jilly Fox was dead, and Claudio Volpe was dead, and Rita Ablewhite was dead, and she, Liz Headleand, was still alive. Her forehead had turned cold and damp. Clammy. She was beginning to feel hungry. The organism, the machine, was beginning, despite all, to restore itself. She rang room service and ordered an omelette and chips and half a bottle of Beaujolais. Propped up, alone, in her white five-year-old nightdress, she studied the unsatisfactory nature of knowledge. The anti-climactic nature of knowledge. So this was it. A night of bad dreams, a day of sweat, then a desire for omelette and chips. Already she was losing interest in the riddle that had teased her for decades. Tomorrow she would go and stuff that old rubbish in the Ideal Boiler and put a match to it. Why bother Shirley with these shabby little speculations? Let them go up in smoke: guesses, suspicions, half-truths, the Royal Family, Stocklinch Hall, Miss Featherstone’s credentials, Dr Alethea Ward, and those pitiable paedophiles. She would remember no more. She would no longer gaze at the past, she would no more question her own wicked heart. On she would go, relentlessly, into the dark-red sun, down the radiant way, towards the only possible ending.

  Liz was relieved, over the following week, to recall that she had formulated the notion of necessary anti-climax for herself, independently, in her day of sweat, for it emerged, anti-climactically, that Shirley’s daughter Celia had known the facts about her grandfather for years. They did not seem to have done her much harm. Shirley and Liz, chewing over the solicitor’s revelations, discreetly stoking the Ideal Boiler with incriminating papers, pondered this discovery.

  ‘Well, she used to spend a bit of time with her,’ said Shirley, puzzled, as she prodded a smouldering bundle of old school reports from Battersby Grammar, ‘but I’d no idea they talked to one another. Or not about that kind of thing.’

  ‘And Celia never mentioned any of it?’

  ‘Not a word. But she’s always kept herself to herself, has Celia.’

  They pondered the mysteries of heredity. Shirley essayed one or two delicate questions about the possible nature of their father’s aberration, but Liz diverted them, claiming not to know much about that kind of thing. Their mother’s solicitor, or rather the successor of their mother’s solicitor, a go-ahead, lively young thirty-five-year-old in Dilke Street, had produced the will, looked through a few old papers, bracingly reassured them: yes, he was well dead, their father, Alfred Ablewhite: yes, as far as he knew Alfred and Rita had been legally married: Alfred had been arrested in 1939 for a minor sexual offence (exposing himself on a railway bridge to primary school children on their way to St John’s C. of E. Infants’ School), had been acquitted, and had shortly afterwards committed suicide, though suicide was not proved. So that was it: the mystery. A sad case. Accidental death. There had been a good claim on the insurance.

  Rather a shabby little mystery; every family has one. So declared Liz, as she watched the papers blacken. No, she repeated, she didn’t know much about that kind of thing, it was not the kind of sexual deviation with which she associated herself, professionally.

  Liz did not say so to Shirley, but she could not help associating this kind of offence with inadequate and retarded lonely young men of the lower middle classes. She remembered one such from her own childhood, in the alley off Jubilee Road, near the Alhambra. He had shaken his big limp thing at her. She had no idea what it was, that big brown unnatural trunk of an object: not very nice, she had thought it at the time.

  She must ask Alix about sexual deviation and class. Alix would be sure to be able to provide a sociological reference.

  ‘I suppose you could call it a relief, really,’ said Shirley. ‘That it wasn’t worse. It could have been worse.’

  ‘Oh, easily,’ said Liz. She regaled Shirley with one or two worse cases that had come her own way. Stunned children, reeling from confrontation with bull-headed minotaurs.

  And their conversation passed, naturally enough, to the Horror of Harrow Road, Paul Whitmore, whose lengthy trial was even then in progress, even then
hitting the headlines of the tabloid press. It was no longer a question of whether he had committed the crimes: more a question of why the police hadn’t picked him up earlier, and whether he would be found not guilty by reason of insanity. If he were, Liz predicted – and in her view clearly he ought to be – there would be an outcry. People seem to think life in a psychiatric hospital is all prawn cocktails and sirloin steak, said Liz. Well, isn’t it? said Shirley. Not even at Garfield, said Liz, did they have prawn cocktails.

  Liz wasn’t very interested in why Paul Whitmore was a murderer. She had lost her chance for involvement by failing to go up and knock on his door that night at Esther’s. She was more interested in the fact that his crimes had driven Esther out of London and, as it appeared, out of the country. Esther was off to Bologna in the summer, off for good. Or so she said.

  ‘But don’t you believe in evil?’ Shirley said, as she tried to tie a knot in a black plastic bag full of old shoe polish, ends of sauce bottles, ancient tins of wartime powdered milk.

  Liz reflected, poked the ashes of police reports into sullen flame. ‘No,’ she said after a while. ‘And I don’t believe in good either. I believe in suffering, and the alleviation of suffering. I believe in pleasure. And I believe in death. I think belief in evil has caused immense suffering. I don’t see the point of suffering. I’d like to do away with it.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ said Shirley.

  ‘I’m not sure I follow myself,’ said Liz.

  ‘I suppose we could get someone in to clear all this,’ said Shirley.

  ‘Yes, we could, but it would be too shaming, don’t you think? Like exposing dirty washing,’ said Liz.

  Shirley laughed. ‘I must say,’ said Shirley, ‘I do think you behaved appallingly to Mother.’ She opened a jar of pickles, sniffed.

  ‘She behaved appallingly to us,’ said Liz.

  ‘Smell that,’ said Shirley, handing over the jar.

  Liz sniffed. ‘Jesus,’ said Liz.

  Alix Bowen sits on the top of a double-decker bus, on her way to work, reading the Northam Daily Telegraph. The sentencing of Paul Whitmore has been driven into second place by the end of the miners’ strike. A new villain has been released to the crowd. The gallant miners have been defeated: in the inelegant words of the Prime Minister, they have been ‘seen off’. Alix does not know what to think. The right-wing Telegraph rejoices, but soberly enjoins its readers to count the cost. Alix sits there and obediently counts the cost. The cost is incalculably great. The nation is divided as never before, the Labour movement is in ruins, the self-deception of some of Brian’s friends has reached the proportions of mass psychosis. Some argue – Liz Headleand’s daughter Sally argues, for example – that all is not lost, what though the fight be lost, for the wives of miners have seen the light, have become articulate, have been radicalized, are moving forward into the brave new world of matriarchy. Alix doubts this. Alan Headleand believes it is possible to fall back in order to leap forward. Yes, maybe, thinks Alix, but Alan is young and he has time in hand. Otto Werner thinks the whole thing has been an unmitigated, irreversible disaster. He is leaving the country. He will not return.

  Alix looks up, from her paper, at the passing streets. She is growing accustomed to the perspectives of Northam. Here is Bard Road, with its condemned council flats. Blind windows, nailed up. Plyboarded. Empty, not quite derelict. Blind bard. Hear the voice of the bard, who present, past and future sees. The Council have been talking of restoring this street for months. There is no money, the Council says. The Council fights the government. Money.

  Alix is on her way to see the bard of Northam, who is not yet blind, though he is somewhat deaf and certainly ageing. She has a new job, with Northam’s famous poet. It is, like all her jobs, a dead-end job, but at least it is not socially useful: in that, at least, it is a new departure, and she takes some pleasure in this. She has had enough, for the time being, of trying to serve the community. There is no point in it. The community does not want her, and she does not at the moment much care for the community. There is no hope, in the present social system, of putting anything right. The only hope is in revolution, and Alix does not think revolution likely.

  Stephen Cox has gone to Kampuchea. Alix hopes he is all right.

  Alix stumbled across her new job by accident. She met Northam’s poet at a party given at the Holroyd Gallery by Esther’s art gallery director friend. They got on famously, Alix and Beaver, after they happened to discover that Northam’s poet had known Sebastian Manning’s father in the old days: ‘Yes, I knew him in Paris,’ said fierce, whiskery old Beaver. ‘In Paris, in the thirties.’ And they had reminisced, in front of a pleasant dullish painting by Rigby Saunders, a painting of a bulrush-fringed pond in Sussex: Alix spoke of young Nicholas, Beaver spoke of his days as an office boy on transition. And so here she is on her way to Beaver’s home, to catalogue his papers, perhaps to edit his Letters; who knows, to write his biography? Beaver, who is a bad-tempered, cantankerous, disillusioned old monster, has taken to Alix. She has become quite fond of him. (She does not feel obliged to pity him. He repels pity, rudely: he is on the far shore.) His house is in chaos. His wife has died, the rooms are stuffed with papers. Time has passed him by, and by its natural revolution, has caught up with him again. He is in fashion, with the younger generation. His works are being reprinted. He is interviewed, solicited. transition, Beaver points out, was a periodical that proclaimed ‘the revolution of the world’. Not much sign of that, grunts Beaver, as he thrusts at Alix another box full of letters from Joyce, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, of sketches by Duchamp, Miró, Picasso, of pebbles painted by Man Ray. Alix, despite herself, is entranced by the stuff. ‘This is worth a fortune,’ she tells him. ‘You’re an irresponsible old fool, not to have got in touch with Ellmann, with all those people appealing for letters in the TLS,’ she tells him.

  Walrus Beaver snorts, threatens to burn them, regales her with anecdotes. He writes her rude poems and threatens to publish them. She laughs, and kisses his forehead.

  The revolution of the world. In a dusty attic in Northam, Alix sits and reads of dead aspirations. But the poems live. Beaver’s poems are good. They are high art, and good. Alix has found her corner in immortality, in Beaver’s attic. She is in a position of power: Beaver has conferred power upon her. She can destroy, edit, publish. She can rejoice scholars and biographers, or deny them. She could even lunch them, at Beaver’s expense.

  She finds a cutting of a review of Beaver’s second volume of verse, published in Scrutiny. The review praises Beaver as one of the best poets of the rising generation. She shows it to Beaver. Beaver laughs and laughs. He tells her stories about the Leavises. They both laugh, until tears stand in their eyes.

  So this is where my privileged education has brought me, thinks Alix, as she sits on top of an extremely heavily subsidized double-decker bus, on her way to a northern suburb of Northam. I sit in an ivory attic, while Brian toils at the coalface with the disadvantaged, the illiterate. Paradoxical.

  Brian thinks Beaver’s work is élitist. This is a new word, from Brian, one he never employed at his old job with the Open University, in the Adult Education College in South London. Can he mean it?

  I have been driven into paradox, thinks Alix. I have not chosen it. I have been driven into it. It is not satisfactory. But what else can I do? She thinks of the two youths with their hamsters, in the glossy brochure. Their premises not yet finalized.

  June 1985.

  It is Esther’s fiftieth birthday. Alix and Liz congratulate her on having arranged the only sunny weekend of a dismal damp year.

  ‘But it won’t be sunny anywhere else,’ says Esther, lying on the grassy hill beneath the blue summer sky. ‘I can only arrange the weather for this valley. Everywhere else, it is raining still. There is a limit to my powers.’

  Alix and Liz beg leave to doubt this. Her powers, they claim with admiration, are limitless, supernatural: had they not been sublimely mani
fested in her summoning up, the evening before, the solid, fleshly apparition of their old Cambridge friend Flora Piercy? Esther laughs, at the recollection of their astonishment. She had not herself been astonished to see Flora Piercy walk into the garden, for she had arranged that arrival, had stage-managed it with some care, had been planning it ever since she had discovered that Flora lived up the combe from Peggy and Humphrey, with her second husband Basil Penarth. ‘You must come down for a drink and surprise Liz and Alix,’ she had said to Flora, and Flora had obeyed her summons and materialized at the garden gate, bearing a bunch of ragged white roses and a Camembert cheese. They had sat in the garden, under the cherry tree, at the wooden table, drinking champagne, exchanging three decades of news. Births, deaths, marriages. Flora claimed two grandchildren, and was now a JP, having settled down, as she put it, after a rackety early career as courier and travel agent in the south of France. Time, said Flora Piercy Penarth, is an illusion. She was accompanied by a springer spaniel.

  ‘That spaniel,’ said Esther reflectively, lying on the grassy hill beneath the blue summer sky, ‘is a bloody nuisance. That’s why I wouldn’t let Flora come on this picnic. She wanted to, but I drew the line. It doesn’t know how to sit still, that spaniel.’

  Esther bit into an egg and anchovy sandwich, held out her beaker to Liz for another glass of thermos-chilled Berry Bros. Saint-Véran ’77.

  ‘This is the perfect day,’ says Alix. They eat, drink, talk, lie there in the sunshine. The grass is rich with buttercups, with clover, daisies, vetch and speedwell: the hedgerow is thick with foxgloves, honeysuckle, campion, red dock seed, forget-me-not, stitchwort. The grass in its own kind, in itself, is rich: bromes, fescues, oat-grasses, quaking grass. Esther points them out, idly, inaccurately. Even Esther is not very good at grasses. She misses a rather unusual rye brome. It evades her notice.

  The green hill slopes up behind them to the brilliant azure. Large pink lambs, surreal, tinted from the red earth, stand outlined on the hill against the blue. An extraordinary primal timeless brightness shimmers in the hot afternoon air. A slight breeze moves the grass like waves on water.