The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

back to admire the effect. It is pleasing, she decides. She wonders what it will look like by midnight. Will she be transformed into an uneven, red-faced, patchy, blotchy clown? An ugly sister? Alix has always felt rather sorry for the poor competitive disappointed Ugly Sisters. Indeed, she feels sorry for almost everybody. It is one of her weaknesses. But she does not feel sorry for her friend Liz Headleand. As she struggles into her blue dress, she wonders idly if she is so fond of Liz because she does not have to feel sorry for her, or if she does not have to feel sorry for her because she is so fond of her? Or are the two considerations quite distinct? She feels she is on the verge of some interesting illumination here, but has to abandon it in order to search for Brian, to ask him to fasten the back of her dress: if she does not leave soon, she will be late for her early arrival, and moreover she has promised to meet Esther Breuer at eight thirty precisely on the corner of Harley Street and Weymouth Street. They plan to effect a double entry.

      Esther Breuer has decided to walk to the intersection of Harley Street and Weymouth Street. She often walks alone at night. She walks from her flat at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, along the Harrow Road, under various stretches of motorway, past the Metropole Hotel where she calls in to buy herself a drink in the Cosmo-Cocktail Bar (she is perversely fond of the Metropole Hotel), and then through various increasingly handsome although gloomy back streets, until she arrives at the arranged corner. As she approaches it, she cannot at first see Alix, but she believes that Alix will be there, and indeed momently she is: they converge, Esther from the west, Alix from the south, and moderate their pace (Esther accelerating slightly, Alix marginally slowing down) so that they meet upon the very corner itself. They are both delighted by this small achievement of coordination. They congratulate themselves upon it, as they walk north towards Liz’s house in Harley Street, towards the invisible green of Regent’s Park.

      Liz Headleand sits at her dressing-table in her dressing-room. Her gold watch and her digital clock agree that it is nineteen minutes past eight. At half past eight she will go downstairs to see what is happening in the kitchen, to see if Charles is in his place, to see if any of her children or stepchildren have yet descended, to prepare to receive her guests. Meanwhile, she has eleven minutes in hand. She knows that she ought to ring her mother, that there is still a faint possibility that she might ring her mother, but that possibility is already fading, and as the admonitory red glare of the clock clicks silently to 20.20 it gasps and dies within her. She will not ring her mother. She has not time.

      Instead, she sits there and for a moment contemplates the prospect of her party, the gathering of her guests. She knows them, their reluctance, their need, their larger hopes. She can hear their conversations, in cars, in bedrooms, in restaurants, at other parties, as time draws them nearer to her, to one another, to her house. She eats a pistachio nut, and fastens her locket. New Year’s Eve. A significant night, at least in journalistic terms, and there would be journalists here this evening, no doubt comparing their analyses of the bygone seventies, their predictions for the 1980s. And for her, too, significant in other, superstitious ways. Since childhood, since her early school days, New Year’s Eve had possessed for her a mournful terror: she had elected it to represent the Nothingness which was her own life, the solid, cheerful festival which had seemed to be the lives of others. New Year’s Eve in those early years had possessed a dull religious sheen, a pewter glimmer, which by much effort and polishing and dedication of the will could bring her a little light, a little hope, a little perseverance: but she had longed for the flames and the candles, the cut glass and the singing. Disproportionately she had longed, in the interminable wastes of adolescence, in the grey and monotonous steppes, and some of the longing had attached itself to this night, this one night of the year, when others (she knew from schoolfriends, from the radio, from novels), when others went to parties and celebrated whatever was about to be. She had longed to be invited to a party, a longing which presented itself to her as a weakness and a wickedness, as well as an impossibility. She had comforted herself with her own severity. Finally, after long years, she had become a party-goer. How those oblong cards with her own name upon them had delighted her! Crazily, disproportionately. And now she was a party-giver as well as a party-goer.

      Her dressing-table glitters and shimmers, it is festive like the night. It is white and gold, quietly ornate. Beneath the protective glass lies, imprisoned, flattened, a circle of Venetian lace, elaborate, fine, rose embossed, cream coloured, expensive, hand worked, beautiful, useless: a gift, though not of this year’s giving. On the table lie a silver-backed hand-mirror, a silver-backed brush, an ivory paper-knife with a silver handle. Over a little carved corner of the large oval mirror into which she absently stares, not seeing herself, hang necklaces: amber, pearl, paste. She rarely wears them: she wears her little locket, superstitiously. The blond shells of the pistachio nuts, with their seductive little green gleaming cracks, repose in a small Sheffield plate dish on a stem, an oval dish which echoes, satisfactorily, elegantly, the shape of the nuts: the surface of its lining is tinily scratched, pitted and polished, golden, antique, dull but shining. Behind the dish stands this year’s Christmas gift, from her eldest stepson Jonathan: a tiny, cut-glass snowdrop vase which holds a posy of cold hothouse snowdrops, white and green, delicately streaked, fragile, hopeful, a promise of futurity. Liz Headleand is known to like cut glass, so people give it to her, on occasions, pleased to have their gift problem thus simply solved.

      Liz Headleand stares into the mirror, as though entranced. She does not see herself or the objects on her dressing-table. The clock abruptly jerks to 20.21.

      She and Charles have never given a party on New Year’s Eve before. They have given many parties in their time, but on New Year’s Eve they have always gone out to the gatherings of others – sometimes to several gatherings in the course of the evening, and some years separately, not always meeting even for the magic chimes. A modern marriage, and some of its twenty-one years had been more modern than others. Maybe, Liz reflects (for this is what she contemplates, through the oval mirror), maybe this is why they decided to have such a party, this year, at the end of this decade: as a sign that they had weathered so much, and were now entering a new phase? A phase of tranquillity and knowledge, of acceptance and harmony, when jealousies and rivalries would drop away from them like dead leaves? Well, why not? After twenty-one years, one is allowed a celebration. Charles is fifty, she herself is forty-five. There is a symmetry about this, about their relationship with the clock of the century, that calls for celebration. And therefore grumbling couples complain in cars on their way to Harley Street from the Home Counties and beg one another not to let them drink too much: therefore Esther and Alix meet and laugh on a street corner a few hundred yards away: therefore stepchildren muster and stepparents-in-law assemble: therefore Liz Headleand’s mother sits alone, ever alone, untelephoned, distant, uncomprehending, uncomprehended, remote, mad, long mad, imprisoned, secret, silent, silenced, listening to the silence of her house.

      Charles and Liz, naturally, did not construct the notion of a New Year’s Eve party in this spirit, as a portent, as a symbol, as a landmark in the journey of their lives. As far as Liz can remember the idea came upon them rather more casually, one Saturday morning in early November over breakfast. Charles and Liz rarely breakfast together, they are both far too busy: Liz often sees patients at eight in the morning and Charles’s working hours are wildly irregular. But at weekends, they attempt to rendezvous over the Oxford marmalade, and on this occasion had succeeded. Charles, eating his toast, opening his mail, had suddenly exclaimed with a parody of fury, ‘Christ, it’s the Venables again!’ ‘What have they done to you now?’ she had mildly enquired, looking up from a photocopy of an article on The Compulsion to Public Prayer: a study of religious neurosis in a post-Christian society which she had just received in her own post, and Charles had said, ‘Asked us to a New Year’s Eve party.’

      ‘What, now, in November?’

      He pushed the invitation over to her: she regarded it with mock distaste.

      ‘It’s got pictures of little cocktail glasses and tinsel spots on,’ she observed.

      ‘I could see that for myself,’ said Charles.

      ‘I refuse to invite them to dinner,’ she said.

      ‘Of course we don’t have to invite them to dinner. Ludicrous couple. Ludicrous.’

      Liz smiled. She enjoyed Charles’s