The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

mother sits in Northam, listening to what?

      Liz stands up, regards herself, inspects her hemline, adjusts the safety pin fastening her gold leather belt, admires her gold sandals, pats her silver locket, and smooths the limp, cross-cut, loose-woven cream Moroccan cotton over her broadening hips. She looks upon her broadening hips as an affirmation of life. (Her mother is a scraggy old thing, starved and skinny.) She pulls in her stomach, smartly, as she will remember to do, episodically, throughout the evening, when not too deeply engaged in other pursuits.

      Now Charles, he is a different case, she acknowledges. For him, weight is no longer perhaps a laughing matter. He ought to take more care. He is getting solid, even fat, and that reddish tinge to his face has become permanent rather than intermittent. Too many lunches, too many dinners, too many glasses of port at the club beam betrayal from Charles’s complexion, bulge from his shirt front. His hair is receding, too. She wonders where he is. She has not seen him since half past six, when they met in the kitchen over a salami sandwich. He was preoccupied, and spoke of trouble with the Home Office and a documentary on prison conditions. The fatter and balder Charles becomes, the more formidable he looks. She supposes that this is only natural. He is probably downstairs, knocking back a stiff gin and tonic before submitting himself to the milder offering of champagne.

      20.35 says the little red clock. She has lost five minutes, somewhere. It is time to go downstairs, to see how Deirdre is getting on in the kitchen, to make sure the butlers are not drinking too much.

      So down the wide staircase she goes, past the oak chest with its bowl of white roses on the half-landing, past the Albers squares, past the dim varnished portrait of a full-bosomed crimson-gowned pearl-decked eighteenth-century woman who some take to be an ancestor, though she had in fact come with the house, down through the black and white tiled hall with its marble and gilt claw-legged table strewn with Christmas cards, gloves, and glossy free advertising magazines, and into the broad high first-floor drawing-room, where sat Charles, drinking a gin and tonic, which she had expected, and talking to Esther and Alix, which she had not.

      Three floors up, on the top floor of the large house, Sally Headleand sat on her bedroom floor painting her toe-nails a pale silvery green and listening to her stepbrother Alan trying to explain about inflation and unemployment and monetarism and the economic implications of the new rhetoric praising the Victorian values of family life. In the background, Tom Robinson on a new Christmas cassette sang ‘The Winter of Seventy-Nine’. Sally liked listening to Alan, though she understood only one word in a hundred. He was loyal to the old Left, was Alan, unlike their turncoat father who had in recent years been wooed by, and had, it seemed, espoused, the radical Right. The unions had driven him to infidelity. Alan reassured her. Her father upset her. Her mother said it was stimulating to be upset, and maybe it was, but that didn’t prevent her from preferring the solace of the old wisdom. It had surrounded her at her progressive private school, it surrounded her still at her fashionable newish university, but she herself lacked economic grasp and was uncomfortably aware of having lost, of late, a few arguments with outsiders, of having been thrown back on arguments about personalities. She was too intelligent to enjoy this position, and too much of a feminist not to be made uncomfortable by its sexist implications. So it comforted her to see Alan lying there on her bed, his huge ancient unpolished cracked shoes nestling comfortably in the tangled mess of her grey sheets and leaking duvet and discarded purple socks, his eager owl face shining with enlightenment as he spoke abstractly of public spending projects and the American New Deal and tight fiscal policy. One could never tell when or whether Alan was wholly serious, for he found ideas exciting in themselves, too exciting, perhaps, ever to be put into practice: there he lay, smoking, waving, occasionally running his fingers through his thick black curly hair, and dropping cigarette ash through the slit into an old Coca-Cola tin. He spoke of the state as mother, of the history of those who clung to the state as mother, of the psychology of those who wished to orphan themselves from the mother, of the novel oddity of a woman prime minister who was in fact a mother but was not nevertheless thereby motherly. Sally listened, entranced. She didn’t see enough of Alan, now he had moved to Manchester. She needed a regular fix from Alan, to reassure her that the world was still familiar, manageable, subject to known laws.

      Alan himself had never known his mother. His mother had died in a car crash when he was three months old. He, with his two elder brothers, had been brought up by a nanny, until, three years later, his father married Liz. Liz had taken on Alan and his brothers. The three boys had always assumed, as soon as they reached the age for such assumptions, that Charles had married Liz in order to provide the three motherless babes with a proper family life. Sally, of course, had never assumed anything of the sort.

      It was shortly after Sally’s birth, in 1960, that Charles had purchased this large house. It had seemed, at the time, a daring gesture. Forty thousand pounds he had paid for it, a sum which now seemed laughably small, but which in those days had been a vast amount to pay for a private house, even in such a prime position. It had been financed by blood money, blood money from the wealthy parents of Charles’s dead wife. Liz had been keen on the transaction. The house had been in an appalling condition, full of junk and rubbish, its elegant lines unreadable through years of accretions and demolitions. It had been used for many years as a staff hostel for an Oxford Street department store. Five floors, and broad, with an eighteenth-century spaciousness. A challenge. They needed a large house, with four children already, possibly more to come, with a housekeeper and an au pair girl: impossible to survive much longer in their cramped, narrow, bijou terrace in Fulham. From Fulham to Harley Street was an extravagant removal, not the kind of move that young professional couples made, in those days, but the Headleands, ambitious, imaginative, self-appointed pioneers of they knew not what, had done it, and with aplomb. The house, in 1980, would be worth, their friends enviously muttered, perhaps a million, perhaps more. True, the rates had soared, but so had the Headleands’ incomes. It now lodged not only what was left of the Headleand family, but also the private part of Liz’s practice, and the practices of two of her colleagues: a shared secretary had taken over what had once been the au pair girl’s flat. A going concern, a successful enterprise.

      Liz loved the house, she loved the neighbourhood. It gave her great delight, to see her children and Charles’s, here, thus, in the centre. Her own childhood had been lived on the margins: she had wanted theirs to be calm, to be spared the indignities of fighting unnecessary territorial and social wars. They would have greater freedom thus, she argued. Charles shared this faith. His own childhood, though markedly less strenuous, less arduous than Liz’s, had not been without its privations, its humiliations. He liked the centre as much as Liz herself.

      Liz still, after all these years, found satisfaction in giving her address. Each time a shop assistant or a clerk or a tradesman wrote down Dr E. Headleand, Harley Street, the same thrill of self-affirmation, of self-definition would be re-enacted. Liz Ablewhite of Abercorn Avenue had become Liz Headleand of Harley Street, London W1. Nobody could argue with that, nobody could question it, it was so. Her largest dreams, her most foolish fantasies, had been enacted in bricks and mortar and mantelshelves and tiled floors and plaster ceilings. It seemed improbable, but it was so. The Headleands of Harley Street. Resonant, exemplary. A myriad uncertainties and hesitations were buried beneath that solid pile, banished by the invocation of a street name. Vanished suburbia, vanished the provinces, vanished forever solitude and insignificance and social fear. No wonder that she and Charles felt that they led a charmed life, that the times were on their side.

      It was not fairy gold that had fallen into their open laps: the first Mrs Headleand, it was true, had conveniently died, but Charles and Liz thereafter had worked for their position. They had studied long hours, both of them, they had burned the midnight oil while munching their way through textbooks and qualifications, through overtime and late-night meetings. They had taken professional risks, had survived personal disasters. And now they inhabited their house.

      It had taken some labour to restore: a gang of builders had spent months ripping down hardboard partitions, taking out gas meters, attempting to rescue old parquet flooring, refitting windows, stripping paint from tiles. The most unpleasant discoveries were made during the process of clearance: cupboards full of urine-encrusted chamber pots, of ancient patent medicine, of dead mice, of moth-infested garments, of fossilized scraps of nineteenth-century food: