The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

a dead baby, and indeed they did find there a mummified cat, which a pathologist friend hazarded to be at least a hundred years old. Uncertain, profoundly and with reason uncertain of her own taste, she had entrusted redecoration to a professional, then an acquaintance of Esther’s, now Liz’s friend, who had transformed the glum greens and browns into white and cream and yellow and gold. This vision she had adopted, cultivated, and now it seemed her own, although she would never have conceived of it herself. She sometimes remembered this and gave it thought.

      Others sometimes pondered it too. White and cream and yellow and gold did not to everyone seem entirely appropriate shades to represent the Headleands, whose natural colouring, as in a party game, might have been supposed to be more primary, more violent, more extreme, more robust.

      The untransformed house had contained treasures as well as horrors, including the portrait on the stairs, and the restored chandelier which now hung, glittering and refracting, from the centre of the ornate ceiling, above the heads of Charles and Alix, who sat disposed, glass in hand, at either end of one of the long settees, and above Esther, who stood by the fireplace reading the Headleand invitations to parties and lectures and public meetings.

      ‘Esther,’ said Liz, in the doorway. ‘Alix. I didn’t know you were here. You should have called me.’

      ‘You said to be early, and we were,’ said Alix. She did not rise, nor did Liz cross to greet her: they were the oldest of old friends, and did not kiss on meeting. Esther put down the Venables’ invitation, and turned into the room.

      ‘You were talking to Charles,’ said Liz, accusing, as she crossed to the sideboard to pour herself a drink.

      ‘We don’t often get the chance,’ said Alix. ‘The opportunity, I mean.’

      All four of them laughed, for no very evident reason, and Charles shifted his weight on the settee.

      ‘We were saying,’ said Charles, ‘that it must be over a year since I last saw Esther. And six months since I saw Alix.’

      ‘And now Charles is off to New York,’ said Esther, crossing the room to perch on a low stool by Alix’s knee. ‘In a couple of months. Or less, possibly. So he says.’

      ‘So he says,’ echoed Liz, with a note of mild surprise. They spoke of Charles as though he were not there, as though he belonged to another world of logic from their own, as though he belonged, almost, to another species. It was an affectation that had developed over the years. It appeared that Charles did not find it offensive.

      ‘Men,’ said Esther, ‘are an unpredictable lot. One has no way of knowing how their minds work.’

      ‘If they have minds,’ said Charles, who knew the rules of the game.

      ‘Well,’ said Esther, changing tack abruptly, as was her way, ‘what do we think we are going to think of the 1980s? I think I might go to live in the country, in the 1980s. I’ve had enough of the town.’

      ‘You’ve said that before,’ said Liz. ‘You probably said it at the end of the 1960s.’

      ‘Yes, I probably did. But I didn’t mean it then, and who knows, I may mean it now. I could go and live in the country. Or I could go and live in Italy.’

      ‘You could, but you won’t,’ said Liz, comfortably.

      ‘One can live very cheaply in Italy,’ said Esther.

      ‘One can live very cheaply in London,’ said Liz.

      ‘Yes,’ said Esther. ‘Some do. I do, for one.’ And she looked round, ostentatiously, at the large drawing-room, the heavy tasselled curtains, the pale shining cushions, the cut glass, the silver trays, the paintings, the flowers, the deep white rugs. Alix’s eyes followed Esther’s. They enjoyed teasing Liz about her pretensions, and rarely had an opportunity to tease her in the presence of Charles.

      ‘This evening,’ said Liz, leaning forward, lowering her voice confidentially with mock importance across the yards of space, ‘we have butlers. And what I think is called catering. And vintage – I think it’s vintage – champagne. Is that right, Charles, is there such a thing as vintage champagne?’

      Esther laughed. Charles, who appeared momentarily not to have been listening, laughed absently.

      ‘In fact,’ said Liz, ‘I’d better go and see what the butlers are up to. They are foreigners and they appear to be drinking. I’ve a feeling that they might be the same lot that I saw at Geraldine’s party last month. One of them fell over a coffee table and threw a whole trayful of bits and pieces on Carrie Donovan and Harry Pritchett. Crudités and avocado dip. Quite messy. We don’t want too much of that. Or not too early in the evening. No, you both stay here and talk to Charles. Esther can tell him what paintings to look at in New York. Charles is not as indifferent to paintings as he pretends. Are you, Charles?’

      And she made her exit, to the kitchen, where her real worry was not so much the butlers as the cook, Deirdre Kavanagh, ex-girlfriend of her eldest stepson Jonathan, a mad and dreadful girl with a talent for puff pastry and a conviction that she was a femme fatale, a conviction alas supported by her authentic Irish beauty and her seductive Irish brogue. Deirdre was not her real name, but her billowing copper-red hair was real enough, and so was her solid, even, dun-cream skin and her lavishly presented bosom. She was somewhere in her thirties: Jonathan had been nineteen when she had seduced him. They would never, as a family, be rid of her now, for she had now fallen in love with Liz and moped sadly and dangerously when excluded from Harley Street for too long. Now she stood there, one hand on her hip, the other holding a knife dramatically poised over an oblong platter of an anchovy- and pepper-covered layered confection, watched by an admiring audience of Mediterraneans. She was wearing a low-cut green silk dress, partially covered by a charming little white broderie anglaise nonsense of an apron, the sort of apron that features in blue movies. Really, thought Liz, really: Deirdre was exactly the kind of neurotic that she did her best, professionally, to avoid – narcissistic, exhibitionistic, selfish, manipulative, childish, unreliable, unpunctual, self-satisfied even in the depths of self-reproach, and yet there she somehow managed to stand, in the middle of Liz’s own kitchen, brandishing a pie knife. She had not yet noticed Liz’s arrival. ‘One, two, three,’ said Deirdre, and the knife descended. The inner layers were perfect. One white, one green, one red. ‘Now look at that now,’ exclaimed Deirdre triumphantly, ‘now look at that, isn’t it a darling?’ The audience nodded, and Liz from the doorway nodded, for she had to admit that for the moment at least everything looked under control: pretty parsley-sprigged snacks awaited distribution, bottles of wine stood in attentive ranks, glasses were lined up, wiped and polished, piles of white napkins lay neatly folded in readiness. Deirdre had a sprig of parsley tucked jauntily behind one ear. Her real name was Nora Molloy. She had confided this to Liz in a tearful moment, not long after Jonathan had run off with the Williams girl. Now, seeing Liz on the threshold, she waved her knife in greeting: ‘So there you are, Liz darling,’ she cried, ‘and a Happy New Year to you, and I’ll be telling you something about 1980, you mark my words, you mark my words, all of you – broccoli will go out of fashion, that’s what will happen in 1980, and no mistaking!’

      And she proceeded to press upon Liz various samples of her skill, but Liz was unable to eat, nervous, wishing that it would all begin, that the curtain would rise, that the house would fill and the thick conversation rise like smoke through the thin, empty air.

      When she returned to the drawing-room, she found that Charles, Alix and Esther were discussing, with much animation, the Italian economy. They did not pause on her arrival, though Alix, ever polite, waved obliquely to welcome her back: watching them, it occurred to Liz that perhaps in all the years they had all known one another, this was one of the very few occasions on which they had all been in the same room. She, Esther and Alix had known one another since their Cambridge days, and often met, but an evening with them necessarily excluded Charles: Esther and Alix did not much care for the world that Charles represented, and his presence inhibited all three of them. Did they despise Charles’s world? She did not know. But suspected that they enjoyed their glimpses of it, on occasions such as this. A male world, a