The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

A communal event.

      And her sister Liz sat at home, missing all the fun, deaf to the call of the flesh, with her Alternative Mathematics, her Chemistry and her Biology, wasting her youth, wasting her opportunities, obeying the will of their mother, programmed, docile, chaste, pale. One autumn night, when Liz was preparing for Oxford and Cambridge entrance, Shirley had come home at ten from the Harpers’, flushed from sexual excitement and from running through the cold streets under the yellowing smoke-scented suburban trees, her body on fire, and had found Liz still sitting where she had left her, two hours earlier, at the kitchen table, staring at the pale-green wall, as though in a catatonic trance. Shirley had clattered noisily on the linoleum, had huffed and puffed and banged about, and finally had said with some passion, ‘You’re barmy.’

      And Liz had slowly swivelled her head round, and stared at her as though from a great way off, and had said dreamily, ‘If you really want something badly enough, do you think you get it?’

      ‘I haven’t the faintest,’ said Shirley, taking off her outdoor shoes and putting them on the rack, putting on her indoor slippers, and guiltily, belatedly, bending down to wipe the shoe marks off the linoleum with spit and hanky. She assumed her sister was referring to getting into Cambridge, which she herself considered a poisonous, disreputable fantasy, and one unlikely ever to be fulfilled: the number of girls who had achieved Cambridge places from Battersby Girls’ Grammar in the last ten years could be counted on the fingers of one hand. She sat back on her haunches, as the smear dried. ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, more solemnly, ‘I don’t know if the amount of wanting has anything to do with the getting.’

      ‘It must have,’ said Liz, who sat there, burning, burning, eaten up with longing for worlds beyond her sister’s guessing: a pale effigy, locked up in imaginings. ‘It must have,’ she sighed. The imaginings were so potent that they took wing and rustled round the room, little winged souls, small bird-faced holy ghosts, emanations: the whole room was suddenly dense with the vibration of their rustling, the old-fashioned white tiles with their rounded edges glinted with their reflections, the linoleum shimmered, the kitchen cupboards shook, the morbid whiteness and greenness of the paintwork quivered, the exposed pipes trembled and knocked. The two girls held their breath, Liz sitting there with her mock examination papers, Shirley crouching by the shoe rack: their prison kitchen filled with presences. These moments carne, but they came rarely.

      ‘I think,’ Shirley said, softly, catching her sister’s low, dreamy, drugged tone, ‘I think it has. Yes, I think it has. What we want, we do get.’

      ‘If we want, for example, eternity, we get it,’ said Liz.

      ‘Yes. Or if we want this world, we get it.’

      ‘But we have to suffer for our wanting,’ said Liz.

      ‘Ah, that’s what I can’t stand, the suffering,’ said Shirley, jumping to her feet, her fifteen-year-old voice reasserting, boldly, frailly, the tones of elsewhere, of normality and new Bird’s Eye peas and modern kitchenettes, of television and hands fumbling inside brassières: ‘I can’t stand the suffering, I won’t suffer, I’ve had enough of suffering.’

      Liz stared at her, coldly.

      ‘Then you won’t get,’ she said. ‘You won’t get.’

      At this moment they heard their mother turn off the radio in the other room. They looked at one another.

      ‘What if one suffers, and suffers, and suffers,’ said Shirley, deliberately, vengefully, ‘and doesn’t get? What then?’

      And Liz had shaken her head in pain at the mystery in the next room.

      And still that mystery in the front room continued, reflected Shirley on New Year’s Eve 1979, as she examined the handsome features of the dangerous Queen of Spades, and wondered if the King had come out in the deal. It was a little deaf, and a little blind, the mystery, and its only friend Miss Mynors was dead, but it continued. On and on it went. There was no mercy. Whereas Liz, by some immense, visionary effort had invented her own mercy, under cover of obedience, had drawn up a secret map of escape, and had departed, and was now at this instant giving a party for hundreds of guests where champagne flowed. How could these things be? How could it be that Liz, so young, had known her way out of the maze? Was it true that the mind was wiser than the body? Shirley took a risk and played her Queen, but Cliff had the King, and she lost the trick.

      She must forgive Liz. Liz was right to vanish, as the boys were right to congregate at the Maid Marian and avoid their grandmothers. It was by her own choice that she sat here. It was by her own choice that she had married Cliff, not Steve: it was she herself that had seduced Cliff, in a field of cow parsley on a May evening. She had obeyed her body, she had opened her legs, had pulled him into her and said, Now, come, now. What was, what could have been wrong about that? She had thought to free herself, through nature, through the violence of nature. But nature was cunning and had kept her trapped. What did it want her for? She had obeyed sex, she had trusted sex, she had loved sex, and it had betrayed her, had deceived her, had left her sitting here, a middle-aged housewife, mother of three, playing cards, with nothing before her but old age. Was it so? Could it be so? How had it happened? Was there maybe some other event, some other metamorphosis awaiting her? Or was this it? Shirley, sitting there mildly, the downstairs Shirley, thinking these thoughts, remembering the peremptory demands of the old, the attic Shirley, felt trembling in her, deep deep buried in her sitting-room centrally heated flesh, a wild improper memory, an admissible echo, the faintest thrill of a shudder of remembered desire: Shirley Ablewhite, the bad-good girl, called to her through the knot of her body, painfully, angrily, buried, buried alive, and Shirley Harper half heard her, bent her head, and acknowledged with mixed fear and relief the stirring, the tremor, the sulking, menacing, sweet and half despairing plea.

      Cliff was winning. His pile of matchsticks was considerable. He had had a succession of good hands and won the kitty twice. Now he was playing recklessly, sportingly, trying to let the others in, but he couldn’t help winning, it seemed. His mind wasn’t on the game at all: it was on balance sheets and interest rates and VAT and cash flow and overdraft facilities. Overextended, that’s what they were, too many orders and not enough money to buy the gear. Borrow, said his partner Jim, borrow, but look at the price of borrowing. Sums flitted through his head as he won another unlikely trick with a paltry Knave. Jim was all for going on, for expanding, for advancing rather than retreating, but Cliff was beginning to think that after all he hadn’t the temperament for it, he couldn’t stand the anxiety, he didn’t enjoy the suspense: all he wanted was security, independence, freedom from worry, being his own man. That was all. Nothing too extravagant. But it was true, what Jim said, in business you can’t stand still, you go up or you go down, you can’t just sit comfortably in your own 1972 executive four-bedroomed plate-glass-windowed centrally heated wall-to-wall-carpeted gadget-equipped house, with your Rover and your wife’s Mini in the two-car garage, and your pot plants in your loggia, and your electric lawn mower in the shed: you can’t sit still and enjoy it, you can’t call it a day and call a halt when you own it all and don’t owe anyone a penny, you have to go on and on, relentlessly onwards, juggling with larger and larger sums, owing more, paying out more, until finally perhaps the whole thing comes tumbling round your head like a pack of cards. Jim was right: you had to go on. Risks were part of the game. He’d enjoyed them himself when he was younger. Always ready to accept a challenge, his school reports had said. It wasn’t the hard work he minded, he liked work, he liked long hours, he didn’t want to slack off: it was the anxiety he couldn’t stand. Where was it going to end? Inflation made one run to stand still. What if one ran and slipped backwards? A nightmare world. Maybe after all he’d have been better off like his Dad, quietly pushing papers round a desk in an office at the Gas Board for nine hours a day for nearly fifty years. A living death, it had seemed to him and Jim, but maybe it hadn’t been so bad. It had been safe, at least.

      They were still talking about Australia, the land of opportunity. Fred’s Barbara had gone out there with her bricklayer husband and now he had a building firm and employed ten men. Cliff and Jim employed twenty, making screw-on wing-mirror attachments and assembling picnic sets.

      ‘It’s coming up