The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

meeting of a board of directors, laced with unfounded but inventive innuendo about a country house which he and Liz were said to be purchasing as a tax dodge. There had also been offensive remarks about Charles’s ageing toothless bite. Charles had been particularly annoyed about the toothlessness, she could tell, although he tried to conceal it: he had in fact been without his two front teeth that week, while having their thirty-year-old caps replaced, caps that marked a heroic accident long ago in a swimming pool in Sevenoaks. He had proved remarkably (to her, touchingly) sensitive about their temporary absence. Losing two front teeth, even two false front teeth, at the age of fifty, even if only for a week, had distressed him: he had sat opposite her at the breakfast table with a napkin over his mouth, and she knew that it had taken some courage to go to the board meeting at all. No, Charles certainly did object to Ivan’s insults, and Ivan’s divination of Charles’s weak spots was uncannily accurate.

      She, for her part, was of the opinion that she did not object to Ivan’s insults at all. She saw them as emanations of his own tormented, neurotic, anally fixated personality, and nothing to do with herself. She was convinced that he was in reality quite fond of them both. Particularly of herself. He was grateful to her for her power of forgiveness, she suspected, for the absolution she continued to extend. Such an ugly, red-faced, no, worse, blue-faced little man. Small, squashed, snub, stout. She had known him for many years. One would have thought that the principle of people living in glasshouses not throwing stones would have warned Ivan off a career as a journalist, gossip, and so-called satirist, but it did not seem to occur to him that he was asking for trouble of a kind that she knew would cause him the most intimate anguish: but in fact, so appalling were Ivan’s features and physique that comment on them was rare, even his worst enemies (and he had hundreds) not considering them fair game. Comment on his dreadful behaviour, by contrast, flourished. Maybe, she idly wondered, as she drew a red biro daisy by the Metropole Hotel, maybe he chooses to be so offensive verbally in order to divert attention from his appearance? An interesting conjecture. Though Ivan claimed success with women, despite or because of his natural handicaps, and Liz herself, though she had not slept with him, had on one occasion in the early years of her marriage to Charles found herself, to her own surprise, sitting on a table in a flat in Belsize Park Gardens with Ivan’s hand inside her bra. She could remember the incident quite clearly, although the circumstances surrounding it had vanished into oblivion, beyond recall of any form of analysis: it had been early afternoon, so clearly not a party incident – maybe they had had lunch together? – and she had been anxious about picking up children from school. She kept telling Ivan that she had to leave, and he kept telling her that he was a great lover although his prick was only six inches long. Or something to that effect. And all the time his hand had been inside her bra. She could remember the bra, it had been rather a good black lace wired Kayser Bondor, of a line that appeared to have been discontinued, as she’d never been able to find another. But why had they been sitting on a table? And in whose flat? These were mysteries now known only to God.

      She had not slept with Ivan, nor ever would, but was deriving a secret satisfaction from the knowledge that present at her party that night would be all the men with whom she had ever slept: or all save one, and he had been from another country, and she had not known his name. There were not so many of them: five, to be precise, and one of those was Charles, and another her first husband Edgar Lintot, to whom she had remained married for less than a year. Of the other three, one had been revenge, one an escapade, and one half serious, but all had now merged into a sentimental distance, an affectionate presence. She had set much store by retaining or restoring her relations with these men, and thought she knew why. After the sickening shock of the rapid deterioration of her first childish marriage, she had been so afraid of ever again being engulfed by hatred and violence that she had maintained a resolute pleasantness even through the worst of times, even with Charles, who was not an easy man. She had called it maturity, this pleasantness. She was determined never again to be a party to the hideous transformation which overcomes the partners of a bad marriage, who grow fangs and horns and sprout black monstrous wolfish hair, who claw and cling and bite and suck. There would be no more of that: she would see the person as he was, and see him steadily, setting aside her own long shadow as it fell. Her success in this enterprise had fortified her in her career as psychotherapist, had given her confidence in her right to pursue it, in the rightness of her pursuing it. Even her first husband she had regained from that dreadful hinterland of marsh and bog and storm cloud: and now they were good friends, she and Edgar, in the sunlight, harmlessly friends, and on some subjects (the National Health Service, the pathology of multiple murderers, the ethics of reporting violent crime) had struck up alliances that excluded, that increasingly and dramatically excluded, her husband Charles.

      So there they would be, all friends together. Edgar, Roy, Charles, Philip and Jules. A pity about that Dutchman: their union had taken place in a narrow cabin on the North Sea, crossing from The Hague to Harwich in a Force Nine gale, and they had omitted to exchange names and addresses. Would he have enjoyed her party? Would he have raised a knowing glass? They had rolled around in the narrow berth on the unanchored sheet, slipping on the shiny much-worn cheap leatherette surface of the bunk, lurching in and out of one another in a determined kind of way, the only passengers on the boat not to be paralysed with seasickness. The selection of the fittest. The crossing had lasted eighteen hours instead of eight. An epic. Did he remember, where was he, who was he? Too late to recall him now, he was one ghost who could not obey her summons.

      Edgar, Roy, Charles, Philip and Jules. She had finished with them all. Maybe she had finished with sexual intercourse for ever, maybe it was this possibility that gave her this peculiar conviction of strength, this sense of invulnerability, of certainty, of power. They would attack her no more, weaken her no more. She had closed the gates. This was not orthodox, but then, although a Freudian, she was not an orthodox Freudian, and her vision of futurity did not exclude celibacy. From within herself, she would survey. An observer, a non-combatant. As a child, reading her mother’s collection of Victorian novels, Edwardian novels, she had wondered how women could bear to renounce their position in the centre of the matrimonial stage, the sexual arena, how they could bring themselves to consent to adopt the role of chaperon, to sit at the edge of the dance on little gilt-legged chairs gossiping and watching, spectators, as the younger ones innocently paired, as the older ones not so innocently paired, in the ever-changing formations of the floor. How could one bear to be on the sidelines? Not to be invited to the waltz? Not ever again to be invited to the waltz? But now she could see the charm, could read the meaning, of the observer’s role, a meaning inaccessible to a sixteen-year-old, to a thirty-year-old – for the observer was not, as she had from the vantage, the disadvantage of childhood supposed, charged with an envious and impotent malice, and consumed with a fear of imminent death: no, the observer was filled and informed with a quick and lively and long-established interest in all those that passed before, in all those that moved and circled and wheeled around, was filled with intimate connections and loving memories and hopes and concerns and prospects. Nor was the observer impotent, for it was through the potency of the observer that these children took their being and took the floor. Actual children, children of the heart and the imagination, old friends, new friends, the children of friends, they circle, they weave, and the pattern is both one’s own and not one’s own, it is of the making of generations. One is no longer the hopeful or the despairing guest: one is host in the house of oneself.

      So thought Liz Headleand, as she sat at her dressing-table, in her yellow-walled, her yellow marble-veined dressing-room, eating nuts. She put her glasses on to peer once more at the vanished smear of mascara, and was amused to see the print of her face leap into sharp relief: a new trick, for her glasses are quite new. She dabbed again with the tissue. Her glasses amused her. So did the amusing little sag of her incipient double chin, the veining on her cheeks (which, unlike Alix, she does not think to cover with Liquid Foundation), the slight plump soft dimpling of her upper arm, the raised veins in the backs of her hands, the broadening of her hips, the decreasing flexibility of her joints. These signs of age, of the ageing process, she greeted and greets with curiosity, with a resolute welcome. One might as well welcome them, after all: there is not much point in rejecting them. It is all intended, it is all part of the plan. There is a goal to this journey, there will be an arrival, Liz Headleand believes. It is only by refusing to move onwards that we truly die. She truly believes this. She has good reason to believe it.

      Her