The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

when she was in sympathy with them – as, on matters such as the Venables, she usually was. A good judge of character, Charles, she would sometimes with surprise reflect.

      ‘I think we should retaliate,’ she said, a few minutes later, after skimming through public prayer and the letters page of The Times. ‘I think we should have a New Year’s Eve party of our own. That would serve them right.’

      ‘It certainly would,’ Charles agreed. ‘Yes, it certainly would.’ And they smiled at one another, collusively, captivated by this broad new concept of social vengeance, and began to plan their guest list: they owed hospitality to half London, they agreed, it was time for a party, it would kill many birds with one big stone. A vision of dead, flattened, feathered guests rose in both their minds, as they plotted and planned.

      That was how it had been, perhaps that was where it had started, thought Liz, as she stared into past and future, before jerking herself back into the present, which now stood at 20.22. The red clock from the bedroom reflected in the dressing-room mirror, at an interesting, an unlikely angle. Her eyes focused upon her own image. She looked all right, she concluded, without much interest. She bared her teeth at herself, pointlessly. Her teeth were quite large, but there was not much she could do about that now. Her interest in cosmetics, like that of her friend Alix Bowen, was minimal, but, like Alix Bowen, she decided that it was after all a festive occasion, and she began at this late moment to apply a little mascara. Her mascara container, like Alix’s Fluid Foundation, was rarely called upon, and appeared to have dried up. She licked the curved brush, and tried again. A big black dry grainy nodule stuck itself unobligingly to her lashes. Impatiently she reached for a tissue and wiped it off. It left a small black smear. She licked the tissue and removed the black smear, restoring herself to her former state which had been, and still was, in her own view, quite satisfactory.

      20.23. In a few minutes she would go down. She could have borrowed some mascara from her daughter Sally, but it was too late. She should have rung her mother in Northam, but it was too late. Seven minutes of solitude she had, and then she would descend. As she sat there, she experienced a sense of what seemed to be preternatural power. She had summoned these people up, these ghosts would materialize, even now they were converging upon her in their finery at her bidding, each of them willing to surrender a separate self for an evening, to eat, to drink, to talk, to exchange embraces, to wait for the witching hour. Soon their possible presences would become real presences, and here, under this roof, at her command, patterns would form and dissolve and form again, dramas would be enacted, hard and soft words exchanged, friendships formed, acquaintances renewed. The dance would be to her tune. A pity, in a way, that the dancing would be merely metaphorical: this was a house large enough to accommodate dancing, but their friends were not of the dancing classes, would gaze in astonishment, alarm, sophisticated horror, intellectual condemnation, at dancing in a private house . . . another year, perhaps, for the dancing. This year, the dying year, the social dance would suffice.

      It would be a large assembly: some two hundred had accepted, and more would come. She had encouraged her stepchildren and her daughter Sally to invite their friends: they would add colour, diversion, eccentricity, noise. She liked the mixing of ages, she even liked a little friction, and friction there would be: Ivan Warner alone was usually enough to raise the temperature of any social gathering to conflagration point, and Ivan in conjunction with Charles’s Fleet Street friends and television moguls, with a few publishers and poets and novelists, with an actress or two, with a clutch of psychologists and psychotherapists and art historians and civil servants and lawyers and extremely quarrelsome politicians, would surely manage to set the place on fire? Surely this night the unexpected would happen, surely she had summoned up the unexpected. She had, of late, felt herself uncannily able to predict the next word, the next move, in any dialogue: she could hear and take in three conversations at once: she could see remotely as through a two-way mirror the private lives of her patients, sometimes of her friends: she had felt reality to be revealed to her at times in flashes beyond even the possibility of rational calculation: had felt in danger (why danger?) of too much knowledge, of a kind of powerlessness and sadness that is born of knowledge: for these reasons, perhaps, was it that she had decided to multiply the possibilities so recklessly, to construct a situation beyond her own grasping? A situation of which not even she could guess the outcome? Had she wished to test her powers, or, a little, to lose control and stand aside? To be defeated, honourably, by the multiplicity of the unpredictable, instead of living with the power of her knowingness? With the limits of the known?

      She had thought, back in November, that the party was merely a celebration, a celebration of having survived, so long, with Charles: twenty-one years, unique in the circle of their acquaintance. Battle and bloodshed and betrayal lay behind them, and now they met peacefully in this large house, and slept peacefully in their separate rooms, and met at weekends over the marmalade, and would continue to do so until Charles’s new appointment took him, in a couple of months, to New York. He would return to visit her, she would fly out to visit him, they would speak on the telephone, they would not miss one another. This was understood. Nobody expected Liz to uproot herself, like a woman, like a wife, and follow her husband to America: she was expected to stay where she was, pursuing her own career and pursuing her own inner life, whatever that might be. A modern marriage. Charles and Liz Headleand. Liz knew how they were regarded: as a powerful couple who, by breaking the rules, had become representative. They represented a solidity, a security, a stamp of survival on the unquiet experiments of two decades, a proof that two disparate spirits can wrestle and diverge and mingle and separate and remain distinct, without a loss of brightness, without a loss of self, without emasculation, submission, obligation. And the image, the public image, is not wholly false, although naturally its firm talismanic outlines conceal a great deal of past pain and confusion, of dirty bargaining, of occasional childishnesses, of outright disagreements: and the present is not wholly peaceful. If it were, it would be dead, Liz tells herself. Conflict is invigorating, it renews energy. So she tells herself. She disapproves of a great deal of Charles’s life, these days; she thinks his ambitions misplaced, his goals suspect, his methods dangerous, his new political alignments deplorable: but she is loyal to Charles, to Charles himself, to the man that these manifestations in her view misrepresent. She believes in Charles, in her own fashion, and believes that he believes in her. Their past, with all its secrets, is solid behind them, and cannot be disowned. Their union has a high, embattled, ideological glamour; their dissent is a bond. Her loyalty, she believes, is worth a great deal to Charles: it gives him plausibility.

      Or is this line of thought simply a rationalization of the truth, which is that these days she and Charles disagree about almost everything?

      A celebration, a farewell party. Charles will be away for at least a year. She is glad he is going, she thinks. The strain of living up to the lofty concept of marriage that they have invented is tiring, at times, and she is a busy woman. A year off will not come amiss. It will give her peace, privacy

      She eats another nut, and needlessly, absently, combs her hair. She finds it hard to think clearly about Charles. The time span of the thinking is too long, it makes the present moment arbitrary, a point on a graph that is in itself meaningless. She looks down at her shopping-and-memo list, to find a nearer focus. Perrier water, it says. Poinsettia. Prunes. Remind Deirdre about tabasco. Japanese seminar, Metropole Hotel. Ask Ivan about R. P. R. P.? Who or what was R. P.? She must have known last night, while constructing this list. Maybe it will come back to her, when she sees Ivan. She suspects that Charles suspects that she had once had an affair with Ivan, but of course she had not, though she concedes that Ivan is so unpleasant that only a degree of past sexual intimacy could plausibly explain the kind of relationship that he and Liz have over the years established. Charles had not wished to invite Ivan to the party. Wherever that man goes, there is trouble, he said. But that is the point of him, Liz had replied. Liz prided herself on her tolerance of Ivan’s appalling behaviour. Anyway, she said, we’ll have to ask him, or he’ll be even ruder about us in his next article. I don’t give a damn about Ivan’s ridiculous rag, said Charles, but of course he did, he cared much more than she did, and with reason, for Ivan usually managed to deliver her some backhanded compliment, whereas Charles always got it in the neck: ‘HEADLEAND CRASHES HEADLONG’ had been the headline of Ivan’s latest piece of gossip, which had consisted of a dangerous account