The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

been renovated, it belonged to another age. Solid provincial comfort, a little shabby now, but solid. They had stuck it out, as the area stormed around them: they had stood their ground, resisting all offers of rehousing, uprooting. They would die in their own beds. Their high-smelling dog lay on the hairy ancient rug before the smokeless fuel fire. Round the corner another old woman in her seventies awaited the departure of the year, huddled in bed for warmth, clad in layer upon layer of old nylon nightdress, woolly cardigan, matted flannel dressing-gown, gazing at an unsatisfactory black and white television flickering at her from a chair by the bed. She could see nothing, could make out nothing, but it was a comfort, it was company, she heard its voices, they spoke to her. In the flat below, a teenage couple quarrelled about whether it was safe to leave the baby and go down to the pub. The baby cried, as babies do. The more it cried, the more they wanted to leave it, and the less safe it seemed to leave it. The girl began to cry, as girls do, and the teenage father went out on his own, slamming the door behind him. The girl shouted abuse after him, then picked up her baby for comfort, and settled down to watch telly with the remains of a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

      Further out, in the fashionable village-suburb of Breasbrough, civic spirits were high at a New Year’s Eve party, where left-wing councillors, left-wing teachers, left-wing journalists, left-wing social workers and a few agnostic entrepreneurs raised their glasses and looked forward to the exhilarating confrontation of the approaching steel strike: they were high on a recent freak by-election in the neighbourhood which had reversed the national trend to the Right and given, in their own view, a renewed popular blessing to their defiant, daring programme of high social expenditure. Socialism begins at home, they told one another as they filled their glasses with Oake and Nephews’ Special Christmas Offer Beaujolais. Northam’s elderly historian and honorary ideologue sat glumly in a corner with a plateful and a pint, and watched with silent outrage, as was his way. He did not trust this new wave of optimism. He had seen too many waves fall harmlessly upon the shore. He did not approve of wine drinking. He was going deaf: on purpose, he sometimes thought.

      Half a mile up the hill, spirits were also high in the home of Eddie Duckworth, that plump, much-loved, avuncular manager of Pitts and Harley, newly elected President of the Chamber of Commerce, who had faith that at last a government had been elected that would put a stop to inflation, high interest rates, rocketing domestic and industrial rates, shameful capitulation to the unions, centralized bureaucratic planning, and the consequent decay of the manufacturing industries: the writing is on the wall at the Town Hall, he told his guests, as their glasses were refilled with Oake and Nephews’ Beaujolais. Eddie Duckworth smiled and sparkled and shone. There was much laughter in both Breasbrough houses. There were one or two guests that had been invited to both Breasbrough parties. Northam is a small city, a parochial city. Mrs Eddie Duckworth did not laugh, although she tried to smile. She was not very good at smiling these days, and the unease disseminated by her unconvincing efforts led Eddie Duckworth to mutter to her in a corner, with a mixture of sharpness and sorrow, that perhaps she’d better go to bed. He didn’t know what had come over her, of late.

      Shirley Harper, Liz Headleand’s younger sister, was at none of these parties, and had been invited to none. She had been expected to invite people in. This was now, at forty-three, her lot. Though in the old days it had been she who had braved her mother’s disapprobation and slipped out to enjoy herself, while her sister stuck grimly to her books and her duty and her long-term plans. Shirley had been the rebel, the self-willed, the unappeasing. She had lied and deceived, she had painted her lips with toxic red paint from a box of water colours or with the less toxic red dye of rationed Smarties, she had darkened her lashes with shoe polish and perfumed herself with sample offers of cheap perfume solicited through sycophantic correspondence with cosmetic manufacturers. She had visited coffee bars with boys. She had been to the cinema with boys. She had left school against her mother’s wishes, had married against her mother’s wishes.

      Yet while Liz, the good daughter, the dutiful daughter, was taking a deep hot bath on New Year’s Eve before changing for her party, Shirley the rebel was serving up a hot meal for her mother in the old house in Abercorn Avenue before rushing back (without appearing to rush) to see what was happening in her own oven at home, where she was cooking a goose for her husband Cliff, his brother Steve and his wife Dora, her own mother- and father-in-law, and Dora’s Uncle Fred. While Liz was nibbling pistachio nuts, surveying dominions, Shirley, hot, red and angry (but not appearing to be angry) was listening yet once more to her mother-in-law’s description of her digestive system and what the doctor had said about the swelling of her legs, a commentary which followed closely upon her complaints about the absence of her two older grandchildren who had (in Shirley’s view very wisely) buggered off to a disco at Maid Marian’s Nitespot. ‘In my day,’ she was saying, ‘New Year’s Eve was a family evening, young people didn’t just suit themselves. We all used to be together on New Year’s Eve, didn’t we, Dad?’

      Her husband, thus addressed, did not reply: he rarely did. Since his second stroke he had found the effort of conversation hardly worth the meagre rewards. Whatever he said was always ignored: for years, even when in health, he had been used by his wife as a ventriloquist’s dummy, in support of an endless succession of mutually contradictory banalities, and whenever he had risked an original or even a conciliatory remark he would be firmly rebuffed. So now he sat there, his napkin tucked around his chin, smiling gently: a mild-natured, weak, weakened old man, loyal to his bully of a wife, glad to be included, glad Shirley hadn’t found it all too much for her, grateful to sit there in the warmth of the nice oil-fired 1970s central heating. It made a change. He didn’t get out much.

      Steve replied for him. ‘Well, we’re all together still, aren’t we?’ said Cliff’s brother Steve, with some asperity: he could have thought of better ways of spending the evening, given the choice.

      ‘Apple sauce?’ asked Shirley, who was dishing up, with her back to the table, from a hotplate on a trolley.

      ‘It all depends what you mean by family,’ said Dora’s Uncle Fred, who tended to pedantry. He looked round, moved his fork cautiously to a different angle on the best embroidered cloth. ‘I’m not family, strictly speaking. Here courtesy of Dora. And of our charming hostess, of course.’

      ‘Gravy?’ asked Shirley, and poured it on without waiting for an answer. Family. She had lacked family as a child: had missed it. And now she’d got it with a vengeance. The source of murder, battering, violence. However had it happened?

      ‘Red cabbage?’ asked Shirley.

      ‘Red cabbage? Red cabbage? I thought it was sprouts. We always have sprouts.’ An angry interjection from the oldest Mrs Harper.

      ‘It’s sprouts as well,’ said Shirley. ‘I thought I’d do some red cabbage too. As a change.’

      ‘He won’t like it. He won’t want any. He likes his red cabbage pickled.’ So pursued the oldest Mrs Harper. Her husband smiled and nodded.

      ‘Yes,’ mused Uncle Fred, ‘families aren’t what they were. It’s all this moving around the country. Thank you, Shirley, that’s grand. By the way, Brian asked me to London again, but I thought I’d wait till the weather’s better.’

      ‘All what moving about the country?’ asked Cliff, largely to avert further discussion of sprouts and red cabbage, which he could see was imminent from the suspicious manner in which his mother was turning over the vegetables on her heaped plate.

      ‘Oh, all this moving around for work.’

      ‘Go on,’ said Steve. ‘No one moves round here. They stick fast, round here. Never been south of Nottingham, half the folks round here.’

      ‘I think it’s nice for the young folks to get out,’ said Fred. ‘I always encouraged my Brian. I didn’t want to stand in his way.’

      Shirley smiled sourly to herself as she poured gravy. Somebody was going to have to ask after Brian soon, ask what he was up to, how he was getting on, but nobody wanted to. They resented Brian. He had got away. They hadn’t even the satisfaction of knowing that he treated his poor old Dad badly, because all things considered, he didn’t. It was probably true that he’d asked him down to London.