The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

well. You know. One wouldn’t have wanted to split up the family.’

      This banal observation astounded her, though she did not know why. It seemed to come from another world of reference, an older, ordinary world, of platitude and cliché, of pattern and familiar family ties, a world that she had thought they had never entered, for many good reasons never entered: and now here was Charles himself, invoking its terms, as though it had been there always, as though they had always inhabited its domain.

      ‘Do you mean to say,’ she ventured, disliking the silence, ‘that in your view we’ve only stuck it out together all these years because of the children? Because of the so-called children?’

      Charles shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I thought. I thought that was what you thought. I knew you’d rather have been off on your own, if it hadn’t been for the children. You’ve been very good with the children, I wouldn’t deny that. But I knew you were getting restless. Wanting to be off.’

      ‘Whatever made you think that?’

      ‘You.’

      ‘Me?’

      ‘You.’

      ‘I made you think that?’

      ‘Yes, you,’ he said, patiently, irritably, still with that relentlessly everyday, normative tone, as though this whole discussion were the most ordinary event, the most expected of interchanges. ‘You’re not going to start pretending you want to move to New York, are you? You’ve always made it quite clear that you were staying here and that I could fuck off to the other end of the world for all you cared. You’re too busy to speak some days. You won’t even notice I’ve gone.’

      He spoke without embarrassment.

      ‘That’s not quite fair,’ she said cautiously. ‘It’s not as though you’re not quite busy yourself. You haven’t had much time for domestic life of late, have you? Or ever. Come to that.’

      ‘We’re not a domestic couple. Though I must say, you did a good job with the boys. Considering the problems.’

      The elegiac note sounded ominously, unanswerably, offering calm and collusion: as if aware of the risks, Charles struck suddenly out, moving out into dangerous white water, tipping over the edge into a new reach.

      ‘And anyway,’ said Charles, ‘then there was Henrietta.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Liz, feeling herself begin to glitter and crackle and spark, striking out herself, away from sadness and regret, ‘yes, of course, that’s a point. There was Henrietta. When was there Henrietta? When? Tell me when? How long has all this been going on, behind my back?’

      A new reach, but the words were banal here too: how could she be uttering them?

      ‘I’m not telling you,’ he said, in a manner that later she condemned as sheepish.

      ‘When? This month? This year? Last year? Go on, don’t just sit there, tell me,’ she demanded, in a manner that later she condemned as shrewish.

      He covered his eyes with his hand and moaned. ‘For God’s sake, sweetie. Let’s leave it till morning, shall we? I’m knackered. Let’s leave it till morning.’

      But she heard herself saying, still in shrewish style, that on the contrary there wasn’t any time in the morning, that she had to go to a psychoanalytical conference in the Metropole Hotel with a bunch of Japanese in the morning, that she wanted to talk now, that he couldn’t just announce that he wanted to get divorced and then decide he was too tired to talk about it. On and on she heard herself ranting (could it be that she heard echoes of her own past self, the speaking, ranting, resurrected ghost of that ephemeral figure Liz Lintot?) and heard his vague, evasive grunts and answers: yes, he said, he and Henrietta would marry as soon as possible, Henrietta wanted to go to New York with him, she’d had a thin time herself lately, he needed her in New York, Henrietta hadn’t been well, needed to settle . . . and as Liz spoke and listened she was aware of a simultaneous conviction that this was the most shocking, the most painful hour of her entire life, and also that it was profoundly dull, profoundly trivial, profoundly irrelevant, a mere routine, devoid of truth, devoid of meaning: nothing.

      ‘Honestly,’ Charles was saying, after more than an hour of beleaguered explanation, or semi-explanation, ‘I didn’t think you’d take it like this, old thing, I thought you’d – well, I thought you’d be relieved, to tell you the truth. Relieved to be rid of me. You know me. Worthless kind of chap, in my own way. What did you expect? Good of you to put up with me so long. You’ll have more scope on your own.’

      ‘You lying hypocrite,’ said Liz, exhausted, without rancour. ‘You feeble, contemptible, cowardly two-faced cheat.’

      ‘There, there,’ said Charles.

      ‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she heard herself say.

      ‘Why not?’ said Charles, with admirable, with deadly equanimity. ‘I’ve always forgiven you.’

      ‘Ah yes,’ she heard herself cry, ‘but then I never went away, did I? I stayed, I stayed with you. I never went away!’ And suddenly, astonishingly, astonished, she began to weep, great sobs bursting out of her, tears leaping from her eyes, a kind of howling noise in her nose and throat, and Charles got up and came and sat by her and took her in his arms as she howled like a six-year-old. ‘There, there,’ he kept saying, until she lay calm against his shoulder, calm and sodden: ‘Come to bed,’ he said, and pulled her to her feet, and supported her up the stairs, past the paintings and the roses, and into her bedroom, where she lay motionless as he began to take off her sandals, her tights, her dress. He found her new white Christmas-present nightdress hanging on the back of the dressing room door, and heaved her into it, then opened the bed, and pushed her between the sheets. He found a sleeping pill, a glass of water, and put them on the table by her side. Then he undressed and lay down beside her and took her in his arms. They had not slept in the same bed for nearly two years. ‘There, there,’ he said, soothingly, ‘hold on to me, hold on.’ She held on to him, because he was there, because he had been there. He was very solid. She held on to twenty years of him. Heavy, solid, smooth, adult. Safe. The man who had never been safe became, upon leaving her, safe to her. So it was. The death of danger. No harm to come, no more harm to come. Calm shore. He rocked her in his arms. They slept.

      London nights. Aaron lay awake at the top of the house. He had overseen, foreseen, overheard. The night was still. The party was over. London, West One. He made himself levitate over the capital. Dark street. Would they have switched off the cold fountains in Trafalgar Square? The owls hooted in Highgate, in Wimbledon, in Dulwich. Drinking men lay huddled in newspaper on benches, on railways stations, beneath the arches, beneath the Festival Hall. Aaron listened to the silence, and to the faint music of a cassette: the fifth symphony of Sibelius. Where the swan drifts upon the darkening flood. He communed with his mother, he implored her to drift with him. Was she there, was it she that was with him? Two floors below, his stepmother lay in his father’s arms, for the last time. Sweet Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off. The party was over. Where would he drift now? The soft cool currents of the air lifted him above the sleeping city, swirled him gently. The music gathered its strength. He lay in its arms. It was the first morning of 1980.

      Meanwhile, up in Northam, that figurative Northern city, the New Year had also advanced, ignored by some, welcomed by others, bringing surprises to some, and a deadly, continuing tedium to others. The Other Nation, less than two hundred miles away, celebrated in its own style. In a renovated Georgian terrace house less than a quarter of a mile from the Civic Centre, actors, actresses, arts officers, leisure officers, artists-in-residence, playwright-in-residence, and a visiting jazz musician gathered together to laugh, to sing, to eat spinach salad and green bean salad and mackerel pâté and wholemeal bread and curried brown rice: they played games, word games, charades, quotation games. Northam’s poet sat glumly in a corner with a plateful and a pint and watched with silent outrage, as was