The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

ought to go out and come in again with a lump of coal,’ said Dora. ‘Isn’t that what we usually do?’

      ‘We didn’t last year,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘We forgot. We were watching that Scottish comedian in Trafalgar Square on telly.’

      ‘A dark-haired man, it has to be,’ said Dora. ‘That’s you, Steve.’

      Cliff looked at Steve, ran his hands through his own hair, and said, ‘That’s right, Steve. I’ve got plenty left, but it’s the wrong colour. Yours is bearing up well. Touch it up, do you? What’s that stuff called? Grecian?’

      Steve hit his brother playfully but rather hard on the shoulder.

      ‘Where’s the coal, Shirley?’

      ‘We haven’t got any coal. Oil-fired, we are.’

      ‘What’s the next best thing?’

      ‘Some people,’ said Shirley, ‘have those fake gas fires now, you know, they look like real coal fires, with lumps of stuff like real coal, and real ashes. But it’s all fake. They’re quite nice. Something to look at.’

      ‘Go on, out you go, Steve,’ said Dora. ‘Take something black. It’s for luck. You’re to bring it in in a shovel.’

      ‘We never used to do this when I was a girl,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘Did they in your family, Dad?’

      Her husband nodded and smiled, but whether he had heard the question or not, who could say.

      ‘What does it mean?’ said Shirley.

      ‘It’s for luck,’ said Dora. ‘First footing. It’s for luck.’

      ‘They do it up in Newcastle,’ volunteered Fred. ‘It’s a Geordie custom, I’ve heard say. Go on, Steve, we could all do with a bit of luck. Out you go.’

      And Steve obediently went off, taking with him a jar of Marmite in a garden trowel as a substitute for coal in a shovel, and he stood out there on the front porch in the cold listening to the silence and looking at the stars, waiting for them to let him in on the last stroke of Big Ben on the radio: a faint, feeble echo of some once meaningful ritual, though what it had meant or now could mean nobody there knew or had ever known. And thus, all over Northam, all over Britain, ill-remembered, confused, shadowy vestigial rites were performed, rites with origins lost in antiquity; Celtic, Pict, Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Elizabethan, Hanoverian, Judaic rites: mistletoe dangled from drawing-pins and picture rails, golden stars shone on the Christmas Trees of Prince Albert and geese and haggis and hams lay heavy on the digestion of some, while others laughed themselves silly or sick on rum and coke at the Maid Marian New Year’s Superdisco. Steve Harper, haulage contractor, stood outside alone for a grateful crisp smokeless moment of silence, and when they opened the door to him a strange shadow of the night sidled in with him from prehistory. Shirley Harper touched the locket at her throat, for luck, a superstition she had had since childhood. ‘Happy New Year,’ they said to one another, inadequately, shivering a little. Something was absent, yet something was present. The shadow filled the corners of the broad bright hallway. A pitiful exhalation, an obscurity, a memory. A homeless ghost. The eight-year-old house perched precariously on the raw earth, amongst other isolated, precarious, detached houses, their lights shining on the dark hillside. No one had lived on that hillside for nineteen centuries. The Brigantes had held it once, against the Romans, but they had retreated to the mountains and left it to gorse and the bracken. And so it had remained until the scoops and cranes and bulldozers of 1970s Post-Industrial Man had moved in to uproot the scrub and to build the suburb known as Greystone Edge. A few Bronze Age artifacts were turned up in the dark soil, but they had meant nothing to those who had seen them, and they had been turned back into the earth. Here Venutius, leader of the Brigantes, had crouched in the night by his camp fire dwelling on the treachery of his faithless queen Cartimandua, who had sold her people to the Romans. A tragic theme. Here the Harper clan gather, a small tribe, frail, ageing, on the threshold of 1980, in the presence of the sky: here thirteen-year-old Celia, young, aspiring, judgemental, reflects upon the past, as, long after her usual bedtime, she looks up at the stars and plots her own future. On the threshold of Brock Bank the Harpers gather, bidding one another good night beneath the moon. What obscure blood runs in their veins? Who could have drawn the roots, the branches, the fibres, the tendrils that have fed them and bound them? Ancestral voices whisper from the young dry garden hedge, as Steve starts up his Ford Cortina. Shirley keeps her finger on her locket which rests on her throat like a warm stethoscope. She thinks of her mother. She thinks of her father, whom she has never known, of whom she knows nothing, almost nothing, but whose image, it is alleged, is in that locket: an image which also hangs in an identical locket at this moment around her sister’s neck. A prized possession. Shirley is tired, fatigue has overwhelmed anxiety and desire: she hopes her two boys will come home soon, and go to bed quietly. She waves goodbye.

      In 8, Abercorn Avenue, Rita Ablewhite lies in bed in the dark. She is not asleep. She is waiting for the clock downstairs to strike twelve. When it strikes, she will shut her eyes. When she was a girl, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, she could hear the steam trains’ celebratory whistle beyond the crossing down Station Road. Now she hears nothing but the sounds of her own house. When she was a girl, she could lie in bed and hear her mother and father talking in the next room. When she was a young woman, she could hear distant laughter down long corridors, as she lay in her bed. Now she hears nothing but the sounds of her own house. And she does not hear them as well as she did once. She lies there in the dark, with her eyes open, keeping watch.

      When Liz Headleand woke on the first day of 1980 and found herself in bed with her husband, she remembered instantly the scene of the night before, and wondered how she could ever have been so upset by it. Lying there at seven o’clock in the morning, suddenly wide awake, as was her manner, it seemed to her quite obvious that she and Charles should get divorced: it had surely long been inevitable, and if Charles really wanted to marry that woman (or had he perhaps been joking? – no, perhaps not), well then, let him. She had plenty to get on with meanwhile. Why ever had she taken it so badly? She had an embarrassed recollection of having burst into tears, of demanding to know how long the affair with Henrietta had been going on. I must have been tired, she said to herself reasonably. Tired and a little drunk. All those people in the house. That’s what it was.

      Charles was still heavily asleep. Unlike her, he was not good in the mornings. He lay solidly. She left him there, and went to have a bath: dressed briskly, went downstairs to inspect the damage, had a coffee, looked at her list for the day. It was New Year’s Day, Bank Holiday, but, bizarrely, for her a working day. She had to attend a conference at the Metropole Hotel organized by a group of Japanese psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. They did not recognize the British calendar, or, indeed, she was later to discover, their own: their first choice of conference date had been Boxing Day, but from this they had been dissuaded. The group were admirers of the dissident English Freudian, Jay Spenser, who was unaccountably famous in Japan: they had invited Liz to give a paper on Theseus and the Minotaur: Spenser’s Version of the Family Romance. She wondered what they would make of it as she got out the vacuum cleaner and started to run it over the drawing-room carpet. Would they understand her? Would she understand them? Foster children, stepchildren, institution children. She had no idea of how these patterns were formed in Japan, nor why the Japanese should have any interest in her paper, or in Karl Auerbach’s, or Gertrude Feinstein’s. Stepchildren. What would her own stepchildren say to her divorce from their father? The vacuum cleaner ran smoothly, efficiently over the rich dark-yellow pile, collecting cigarette ash, canapé crumbs, scattered bulb fibre; her mind sang with a faint clear high-pitched hum like a well-serviced machine. She listened to it with an expert ear. It sounded all right, but was there something slightly odd about the tuning, some as yet almost imperceptible new thin whine? She tested it with the concept of Henrietta, and yes, undoubtedly it responded, changing its frequency to an angry buzz before returning to its smooth hum. Henrietta. Zezeee, zezeeee. Henrietta. Zezeeee, zezeeee. Like stepping on an accelerator. The buzz of jealousy. But how could one be jealous of a stick, a statue? The vacuum cleaner, sensing her lack of concentration, took advantage of it to munch and slaver up a long strand of rug fringe: there was a smell of burning rubber. Shit,