A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble

they gave me this leaflet. And frankly, it worried me even more.’

      She hands over the leaflet. It is entitled ‘Implications of the Insolvency Act 1986 and the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986’.

      ‘I mean,’ says Shirley, ‘what about our house? And all my personal assets? Can they be included in the company assets? I’m a non-executive director, I know, but look, it says the Acts make no distinction between executive and non-executive. I don’t know what it all means. To be frank with you I don’t even know what the word “executive” means. I don’t know where I stand. At all.’

      ‘Hmm,’ murmurs Clive Enderby, playing for time. He asks for the name of Cliff’s own solicitors, for the company’s name and registration number, for the names of its other directors. He scribbles them down on a piece of paper and looks knowing. Then he tries to explain to her the distinction between wrongful trading and fraudulent trading, but she is not listening, she cannot follow, she takes in only one word in ten. He explains that he cannot offer useful advice in the absence of more detailed information about the company’s liabilities. He encourages her to call a meeting with the other directors.

      ‘But Cliff is my husband,’ says Shirley. ‘How can I call a meeting with my husband? He won’t speak about these things, anyway. He’s very depressed At least, I think he’s depressed. He won’t admit it. But he is.’

      ‘Perhaps you should get him to see his doctor,’ says Clive, brightly, eager to shift responsibility for the Harpers’ financial and marital problems on to another profession. After all, they aren’t even his clients. They are small fry, little victims of recession, tiddlers.

      Clive watches Shirley closely, as she promises to speak to Dr Peckham. He’s not surprised that she can’t follow her husband’s affairs, but frankly he is rather surprised that neither she nor her clever sister Liz has spotted the intriguing anomaly in their mother’s financial statements. He had noted it at once, and it had led him to an interesting revelation. Now, of course, he does not know whether or not to share it. It is, arguably, of no importance, better left sleeping. Neither Shirley nor Liz has shown the slightest suspicion.

      ‘Give my regards to your sister,’ he says, as he ushers Shirley to the lift.

      Perhaps women never read account sheets, financial reports. Women are interested only in the bottom line, and they can’t always find that. Women will sign anything – hire-purchase agreements, life insurance policies, applications for shares, joint mortgages with defaulting husbands – and they never read the small print, as Clive knows all too well. And even if they try to read it, as Shirley has just demonstrated, they do not understand it.

      They shake hands, outside the gleaming lift. Shirley voices her thanks, but the interview has left her more worried than before.

      And Clive too, trying to put her from his mind, feels a certain unease. The images of Janice and Susie swim, unsummoned, towards him. Wives, women, marriage. The voicing of dissatisfactions. The crumbling of loyalties. The breaking of bonds. Where will it end? He opens a desk drawer by his left elbow, and stares at a new brown legal envelope in which lies a rather grubby document, a Deed of Covenant dated 23 December 1934. Should he have handed it over? He shuts the drawer, and lets it lie there, inert.

      Alix Bowen stops her two-finger typing of a draft of a letter to one of old Beaver’s one-time correspondents and looks up to gaze at her snowdrops. They jostle in the wineglass on their thin stems. She lifts the face of one of them, gazes inquiringly into its intricate green and yellow and white, and lets it fall back. With a sigh, the whole wineglassful rearranges itself, with inimitable, once only grace, to create a new pattern. The flowers shiver and quake into stillness. They cannot fall wrongly. They cannot make themselves into a false shape.

      ‘If you do happen to have kept any of Howard’s letters,’ Alix types, ‘we would be so grateful for photocopies of them. As I am sure you will appreciate, they would be of great value to any future biographer, and there may be the possibility of a volume of Collected Letters at some point in the future.’ She crosses out ‘in the future’ as tautologous, crosses out the ‘future’ in front of ‘biographer’ on the same grounds, and then puts it back in again, as the sentence looks a little too bare, a little too definite, without it. There is no certainty that there will be a biography, no certainty that Beaver’s recent renaissance of reputation will last, although he clearly believes it will. It is Alix’s task to set his papers in order, a task with which Beaver himself co-operates only intermittently. A Herculean task, for the disorder is considerable. But Beaver seems to like Alix, and does not mind her rooting around in his upper rooms.

      Alix does not know whether or not she likes Beaver. ‘Liking’ does not seem to be relevant to what she thinks about him, feels for him. Indeed, the word is not wholly applicable to Beaver’s feeling for Alix either. She is useful to him, in more ways than the way in which she is paid to be useful. She is company, she is a welcome irritant, she shops for him sometimes, she sometimes does his washing up.

      He is a dreadful mess, is Beaver. An egg-stained, tobacco-stained, shabby, shapeless mess. A memento mori. Alix, who does not find the company of old people easy, is frequently disgusted by him. He eats noisily, slopping and slurping his food, and blows his nose violently, and spits in the sink. Coarse, fleshly, decaying.

      Grammar-school educated, university educated, the son of a miner, once destined for a life as a schoolmaster, read Classics, waylaid for some years by poetry. A brilliant mind, he must have had, reflects Alix. There is little evidence of that brilliant mind now, for Beaver has engineered and capitalized upon his return to popularity by cultivating a deliberate boorishness, an aggressive provincialism. Alix is the only person to whom he speaks of literary matters, and even with her he sometimes relapses into a gross mockery of the mind, a philistine, snook-cocking, infantile savagery. Alix cannot tell whether it is all a pose, whether he thinks that this is how a working-class northern intellectual ought to behave, or whether he has relapsed into behaving like this because he finds it more comfortable, and no longer cares. Is he copy or archetype? She cannot tell.

      His career has been curious, enough to drive anyone into eccentricity. After a year or two of schoolmastering in Wakefield, he had taken off for London and lived the life of a literary hanger-on, working in publishers’ offices, writing reviews when permitted, scrounging review copies, copy-editing, borrowing money, publishing the odd poem. He had then vanished to Paris for a couple of years in the late twenties, where he claimed to have got to know the American expatriate literary community and to have worked as assistant editor on transition – although Alix finds this period of his life suspiciously ill documented, and his knowledge of French is now rudimentary and rusty in the extreme. (But he may be joking, that awful accent may be a fake, a stage prop, like that custard-stained check waistcoat and that cloth cap.) He had returned to England, and had become, in the thirties, briefly, successful. References to him and his work during this period were easy to uncover in the little magazines, in the review pages, in the now published letters and diaries of his then eminent contemporaries. ‘Met Howard at the Roebuck.’ ‘Saw Beaver walking along the Embankment with Rose Feaver.’ ‘Discussed Pound with Howard Beaver.’

      And then, after this fragile notoriety, he had vanished. He had vanished utterly, into obscurity. He had returned north, and taken an office job with a company that published technical journals and children’s comics. He had married his old school friend Bertha Sykes, and had children, and grown old. He had missed out on the vogue of provincialism that had swept Britain during the 1950s. He now claimed that he had not even known that it had existed. Kitchen sinks, Angry Young Men, no, he had never heard of them. He lived in the past, in the past of the 1920s that had been his own twenties, in the distant past of Greece and Rome and Ancient Britain.

      Now he has been rediscovered, a living fossil. He has been televised, recorded, reprinted, honoured. He is seen as a sort of missing link in literary evolution, a coelacanth hauled up from the depths of a cultural Continental shelf.

      Or is he, as Alix sometimes wonders, Piltdown Man? A hoax?

      Well, he can’t be a complete hoax, because somebody must have