A Natural Curiosity. Margaret Drabble

his mother with an indeterminate expression which accurately reflects his indeterminate feelings, then watches for a while the muted but loquacious participants in an incestuous BBC Answerback free-for-all about the alleged obscenity of a recent drama series. Tony does not know whether to creep quietly upstairs, like a prudent coward, or whether to attempt to wake his mother and persuade her to go to bed too. His father is away at a conference, so it doesn’t really matter if she lies there all night, or until (which is more probable) she rouses herself in the small hours, makes herself a cup of tea, and then puts herself to bed.

      He wanders into the kitchen to think things over. He has had a pleasant evening with his friend Sam and Sam’s parents. Tony had not met Alix and Brian Bowen before. Alix did not seem the kind of mother that one would find lying asleep on a settee with an empty bottle of wine, but she was by no means unalarming: her wild grey hair, her piercing blue eyes, her intent concentration on everything one said, her large gestures, her sudden exclamations over forgotten parsley sauce, all these things had been slightly disconcerting. She seemed of a different generation from Tony’s mother, but Tony was used to that: most mothers belonged to an older generation than his own freakish darling. Most mothers, in Northam as in Ogham, seemed more reliable, more capable, more regular, more dull than Fanny Kettle. But Alix had not been dull: she had been full of talk, full of questions, full of enthusiasms. She had been particularly interested and indeed well informed about Tony’s father’s recent dig. She knew about chariot burials and Romans.

      Sam Bowen claimed that she was obsessed by a murderer in Porston Prison, and Tony Kettle had waited eagerly for evidence of this, but none had emerged.

      Instead, Alix over the fish pie had talked of the finds at Wetwang, the burials at Eastwold. She was fascinated to learn that the Kettles had actually lived at Eastwold, practically on the site, as it were. She wanted to know what it was like living at Eastwold Grange, how he had found the social life of Ogham, whether she ought to go and visit the ruins of Ogham Abbey. She expressed a polite desire to meet the Kettle parents.

      Tony had drunk a glass of white wine with his supper. There wasn’t any pudding.

      ‘I’m afraid I never make puddings,’ said Alix, as though this deficiency had newly occurred to her. ‘I don’t know why, but I never do.’ Brian Bowen, Sam’s father, had showed less interest in archaeology, but equal interest in Tony’s impressions of social life in East and South Yorkshire. Brian worked, Tony gathered, for the Education Department of Northam City Council. He wanted to know what Tony thought about sixth form colleges, how many kids had gone on to do A-Levels at Ogham, that kind of thing.

      ‘Your parents didn’t think of boarding-school?’ he asked, at one point.

      ‘I wouldn’t go,’ said Tony. ‘They suggested it, but I would stay at home.’ He laughed, a little uncomfortable at being the centre of so much attention. ‘Really boring it was, but I would stay.’ He paused, took another sip of wine, continued boldly, ‘But they took me around, you know. I didn’t spend all my youth in the sticks, as Sam likes to think. I went around with my mother. To London. And Paris. And Venice. Places like that.’

      ‘How nice,’ said Alix; thinking, what an odd boy, what can his parents have been up to?

      Tony Kettle, standing irresolute an hour later in the vast high-ceilinged kitchen of the new Kettle residence, wonders the same thing. And wonders if Brian and Alix are normal parents, or whether there are no such creatures as normal parents? And if there were, would he want them for his own? He shrugs. He doubts it. He will take life as it is. What choice is there, after all?

      He returns to the living-room, quietly removes the glass, the bottle and the ashtray, and slowly, sneakily, from the far end of the room, increases the volume of sound on the television. His mother stirs, mumbles, suddenly sits bolt upright, as Tony backs out of the door and makes his escape up the stairs.

      Attractive danger. Natural curiosity. Unnatural curiosity. Charles Headleand cannot resist pursuing a visa for Baldai, Alix Bowen cannot resist travelling to see her murderer across the lonely moor, Susie Enderby cannot resist returning to take tea with Fanny Kettle, Janice Enderby cannot resist inviting people to dinner and Liz Headleand will not be able to resist an invitation to appear in a contentious debate on television. Their friend Stephen Cox has been unable to resist one of the challenges of the century, the secretive Pol Pot, hiding in his lair, at the end of the Shining Path.

      Cliff Harper’s approach to the cliff edge of danger is less voluntary. He does not have an illusion of freedom. He has been struggling for years to prevent himself from reaching this precipice. He lies awake at night, adding up columns of figures, counting his creditors. He lacks the gift of self-deception, the Micawber touch which might have got him out of this mess. His partner Jim Bakewell blames him for lack of confidence. ‘You’ve got to think positive,’ Jim is – or was – fond of saying.

      Cliff thinks that is all beside the point. Figures are what count, not faith.

      His relationship with Jim deteriorates, almost as dramatically as the non-contractual relationship between Jim’s wife Yvonne and Cliff’s wife Shirley has done. These two women cannot stand one another. The origins of their mutual dislike are lost in history, though there is some remembered legend about a rejected piece of lemon meringue pie. It is known that Yvonne thinks Shirley gets ‘above herself’, ‘thinks a lot of herself’, ‘thinks she’s too good for this world’. ‘Who does she think she is?’ is the phrase that springs most frequently to Yvonne’s lips, when speaking of Shirley. Shirley, for her part, cannot forget or forgive a remark Yvonne once made about Shirley’s mother and the virtual seclusion in which Shirley’s mother chose to live. Cliff and Jim, for years, attempted to mediate, and then to keep the women apart, but rancour persisted, and has now flooded into their own friendship. ‘What did I tell you?’ is now Yvonne’s refrain.

      Jim resigns as fellow-director, tries to get his money out. There is no money. There is talk of liquidation of assets, of consulting an insolvency practitioner. Jim argues (rightly) that insolvency practitioners come very expensive and that the company’s accounts will not rise to one. Cliff muddles on. He cannot sleep, he cannot eat, he loses weight. He worries, secretly, about his health, and furtively consults medical dictionaries in the Information Centre at the public library. They terrify him, as leaflets on insolvency in that same library terrify Shirley. Things drag on, good money is borrowed and thrown after bad, money leaks and oozes away, staff are laid off, the Customs and Excise query Cliff’s VAT returns, he cannot work out how to deregister.

      He does not discuss these matters with Shirley. He has become morose and surly, impossible to live with. He punishes her for his sense of impending failure. He torments her. She wonders if she can stand it much longer. He is a changed man, he is not the man she thought she married. She can see no way out. A kind of dull despair settles in her: this is it, this is the end. But there is no end.

      Meanwhile, she cooks Cliff’s breakfast, and cooks his supper: she cleans his house, pays his household bills, washes his clothes, cleans his bath, buys his soap and lavatory paper. The house ticks over, Shirley ticks over, Shirley-and-Cliff tick over. They watch television together, they sleep in the same bed, occasionally they even go out for a meal together.

      It all seems a little unreal, but then, the country at large seems a little unreal too. It is hard to tell if it is ticking over or not. Are we bankrupt or are we prosperous? Have we squandered our resources and drained the North Sea gold, or is the economy booming and the balance of payments healthier than it has been for decades? Are our hospitals crumbling and our streets full of litter, or have we triumphantly reduced the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement? Are there nearly four million unemployed with unemployment rising daily, especially in the north, or are the unemployment figures sinking daily, especially in the north? Has spending on the National Health Service since 1979 gone down by 5 per cent, as the Opposition claims, or up by 24 per cent, as the government claims? Each day brings new figures, new analysis, new comment, new interpretations, newly false oppositions of factors that cannot properly be compared: for the nation has fallen in love with statistics, although it cannot decide what they mean. A few eyewitnesses continue to describe what they see, as they travel by tube, walk the streets, wait in bus shelters,