The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

socks and brown sandals, the little pedantries, the favourite quotations, the antiquarian commentary, the hydrometer, the tufts of hair in his ears, the batty, potty, dotty, hurt, persistent grin. Dotty Doddridge, Deputy Head, French teacher. What a buffoon, what a butt, what a caricature. How she had suffered for him, for her poor pitiable ridiculous father, how she had hated her cruel peers for their relentless mocking, how she had dreaded each Christmas pantomime, each school-leavers’ farewell, each assembly that she knew her father was due to conduct, each occasion on which she heard him open his mouth in public. The disorder, the whisperings, the giggles, the open contempt! And her mother, in revenge, in reaction, brusque, tart, offhand, cutting, feared, fearing and avoided, uneasily detached, dismissively remote. Large conspicuous wooden figures, Dotty and Dolly, and beneath their knees skulked little Alix Doddridge, creeping quietly, smiling obsequiously, keeping a low profile, longing to be ordinary, longing with such passion to be unnoticed, to be accepted, to be one of the crowd, not Dotty’s Daughter, with all that that implied.

      Ah well, her parents were old now, and retired, and nobody thought them funny any more: indeed, it was only the intensely conventional world of a Yorkshire boarding-school that had made them seem so eccentric in the first place. They were now revealed as what they had always been, not figures of fun, not left-wing political extremists, not loony vegetarians (though they were vegetarians), but harmless, mild, Labour-voting, CND-supporting, Fabian pamphlet-reading intellectuals, of a species that Alix now knew to be far from extinct. Odd, though, that they had once seemed so odd, so isolated, for the school at which Dotty Doddridge vainly endeavoured to teach French had been nonconformist, faintly progressive, certainly egalitarian in its religious and social complexion: it had offered a liberal, secularized, healthy coeducation, and had on its foundation in the 1860s set out to attract the children of vegetarians, Quakers, freethinkers, pacifists, Unitarians, reformers. Its academic success had been such that it had become progressively less progressive, its original zeal swamped by the fee-paying prosperous solid Northern conservatism of parents and offspring: it had become a bastion of respectability, its one-time principles upheld by stray survivors like Doddridge, who appeared blithely not to notice that at election time the entire school, with one or two flamboyant exceptions, howled its enthusiasm for the Tory Party. A rum evolution, Alix had often thought, though it had not seemed strange at the time: what had then seemed strange, in her girlhood, had been her parents’ quaint socialist ideals, which had caused her such embarrassment, and, partly because of that embarrassment, had inspired in her such undeviating loyalty. ‘I say, does your Dad really vote Labour?’ had been one of the politer questions addressed to her at elections and other periods of heightened political interest. ‘My Dad’s a Socialist,’ Alix would mumble in reply, aged eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, thinking that the word ‘Socialist’ sounded somehow more acceptable, more intellectual, than the dreadful word ‘Labour’, with its connotations of manual toil and prison routine. From the age of fifteen onwards she became more defiant, and would sometimes even attempt a half-baked account of some of the notions she had heard discussed at home, in the Deputy Master’s Lodge. She began to affect, in History lessons, an interest in the Soviet Union: such was the climate of opinion in this progressive boarding school in the north of England in the early 1950s, amongst the sons and daughters of tradesmen and doctors, industrialists and university lecturers, dentists and estate agents, lawyers and farmers, that her interest was regarded with awe and alarm or with frank disbelief, by those who did not dismiss it as the affectation which, in fact, at this stage it was. Nobody, during the Cold War, was interested in the Soviet Union, not even Alix herself, not even her parents, who never mentioned the place. It was taboo. Indeed, her father had shocked her by breaking this silence and by advising her, when she went up to Cambridge, not to join the Communist Party: a joke’s a joke, he told her but you don’t want trouble with visas if ever you want to go to America. A surprisingly worldly comment, from so innocent a man, she had thought this.

      Cambridge had been different. There had been Communists there. There had been the lot, or so it had seemed, at Cambridge: socialists, communists, socialites, die-hard dinner-jacketed Pitt Club Tories, Bohemians, Christians, lacrosse and rugger players, sloggers, poets, actors, Leavisites, wits, bores, eccentrics, homosexuals; to Cambridge they flocked, from ancient grammar-schools, upstart grammar-schools, progressive schools, public schools, private schools, even from private tutors in the South of France. God’s plenty. Looking back from the eclectic seventies, the essentially post-sixties seventies, these youngsters of the fifties might well appear a deeply conventional, timid, duffle-jacketed wasp-waisted narrow-based crew, but to Alix, newly emerging from the all-too-personal matrix or patrix of The Heights, they had seemed richly various. Her own college, at first encounter, struck her as somewhat dimly conformist, with long brown corridors and an unexpectedly high proportion of young women apparently wrapped up in the triumphs of yesteryear on the hockey field or in the prefects’ Common Room, but even there she had discovered part of what she was looking for: in the persons of Liz Ablewhite (now Headleand) and Esther Breuer (still Breuer) she had discovered it, and rediscovered it there each time she met them, which was, these days, on average once a fortnight. She had found it in them perhaps more securely than in the friends she had made in other colleges, with whom her relationships had been complicated by sex. She had married one of these complications, for that is what young women did in those days: educated young women married, straight out of college, as she and Liz had done. Liz’s first marriage had lasted all of ten months: Alix’s had lasted slightly longer, and had been terminated not by divorce but by death.

      And now she is married to Brian Bowen, towards whom she drives home through the January night. It is a happy marriage. They have one son, Sam. He is eleven. Alix also has a son by her first husband. He is twenty-four, and his name is Nicholas. Liz Headleand suspects that Alix Bowen is in love with Nicholas Manning, and wonders if she knows it. Brian Bowen suspects that Alix Bowen is in love with Nicholas Manning, and wonders if she knows it. Alix Bowen, for her part, has strong suspicions about Liz’s relationship with her three stepsons, but considers her own feelings for Nicholas entirely natural. Esther Breuer is not much interested in the distinction between the natural and the unnatural. Both Alix and Liz are of the opinion that Esther’s relationship with her niece, with whom she shares her flat, is very odd indeed, but it is not to their advantage to discuss this with one another, or with Esther herself, and they never mention it.

      When Alix arrived home in Wandsworth, she found Brian and Sam sitting comfortably in front of the television on the ancient sofa with their socked and shoeless feet up watching a Len Deighton movie. She told Sam it was time he was in bed, but without conviction. She sat down with them. Brian told her that Esther had phoned and wanted her to ring back. Alix said it is too late. She started to watch the movie.

      In the morning Alix was about to apply herself to a file of Home Office statistics when the phone rang. It was Esther, with the news that their friend Liz had rung her the night before to tell her that she and Charles were getting divorced, and that Charles intended to marry Henrietta Latchett. I thought something was going on, said Esther, and it appears I was right. Good God, said Alix. I had absolutely no idea, said Alix, however did you guess? I saw Charles and Henrietta at a Private View in the National Portrait Gallery, said Esther. Last month. That’s no evidence, said Alix. Well, you know how fond Charles is of painting, said Esther. And evidence or not, I was right, said Esther. Good God, said Alix, what a surprise. She tried to ring you but you weren’t in, said Esther. Well, I don’t know what to say, said Alix, I thought they’d stuck it out so long they’d stay stuck, didn’t you? I mean to say, Charles is an absolute prick, but he’s been a prick for twenty years, why divorce him now?

      Esther pointed out that Charles was the one who wanted the divorce.

      ‘To marry Henrietta?’ asked Alix, in a tone of incredulity. ‘How could he? I mean, he may be a prick, but he’s not an absolute fool.’

      And they continued to discuss the personality of Lady Henrietta, or rather her apparent lack of personality, for some time, until Alix, almost as an afterthought, got round to enquiring how Liz was taking it. ‘She sounded fine to me,’ said Esther. ‘Well, of course, she would be,’ said Alix. ‘But why didn’t she tell us earlier?’

      ‘Apparently she didn’t know earlier. He sprang it on her.’

      ‘Good