The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

Charles had conquered it. First he had mocked it, then he had joined it, and now he represented it. A normal progression. Whereas Esther, intellectually more gifted than Charles, chose to live in a small flat just off the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, earning a pittance from odd lectures, odd articles, a little teaching. Perversity, purity, cowardice, dedication: no, none of these. There she sat, in her familiar party outfit, an eccentric, much-worn, embroidered Chinese garment, her neat, solidly cut, smartly sloping black hair as tidy as a doll’s, looking perhaps faintly Chinese rather than Jewish, diminutive as she was, and with those high cheek-bones: and there sat Alix, also by Charles’s standards impoverished, though not by her own, which were more austere. Alix was wearing a deep bright blue Indian dress with smocking. She looked exceptionally well, glowing with health, almost as though she had been on holiday, which Liz knew she had not. Liz wondered if Brian would come later.

      None of us, thought Liz, is wearing a dress made in England. Moroccan, Chinese, Indian. I wonder what that means, thought Liz. It was the kind of thought that Alix might have been more likely to articulate. She quite often found herself thinking Alix’s thoughts. Esther’s more rarely.

      And Esther, now, suddenly tired of the Italian economy, dismissed it and Charles (‘You don’t seem to realize, Charles, that I live below the reach of the economy, as an economic unit I simply don’t exist’), and peremptorily turned on Liz, demanding to know details of the guest list. Esther’s mind moved quickly, apparently at random; she had a habit of introducing subjects and growing bored, within minutes, of the interchanges she had herself provoked. Abruptness was her most familiar mode, and Liz sometimes fancied that she practised it with peculiar pleasure on Charles, whenever she got the chance: and Charles, accustomed to being listened to with reverence, took it in good part. Though now, as Liz recited names of guests, she saw Charles drift away into what she took to be some private realm of financial speculation and morose managerial debate: he started to bite the inside of his lip, as he did when preoccupied, and to drum his fingers on the silvery-yellow brocade of the settee. These tics, these traits, had become more pronounced since he had given up smoking. Was it a freak of physiognomy, that even in such off-moments he looked so pugnacious, so determined? The square set of his British jaw was hardly disturbed by the neurotic chewing. A gift from nature, such a countenance. It expressed resolution. She could not read it: what was he turning over in there, on the eve of their party? The social life of New York? The restrictions on independent broadcasting? The possibilities of cable television? Or whether or not to have another gin and tonic? Who could tell? The faces of Esther and Alix were mobile, expressive, changeable; they were open to the weather, responsive, at least superficially, even if their darker motives remained obscure. Her own face was also open, she fancied. They had no public faces, the three of them, no public talk. So she fancied.

      Impossible to tell, however, despite this openness, what Alix and Esther really made of Charles. They teased him, tolerated him, avoided him. Women were easily captivated by Charles, when he bothered to make any effort to captivate: they humbly smiled when he turned his head to pay them attention. But not Esther and Alix. They were impervious both to his charm and to his aggression: they had neutralized him. And so he sat there, a tame lion, drumming his fingers, while Esther and Alix and Liz his wife chattered on, about scandals and liaisons, about breaking marriages and delinquent children, about Ivan the terrible, about the Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy, about the Arts Council, about the Beaubourg, about modernism in architecture, about Brian Bowen’s views on his reactionary boss at the Adult Education Institute, about what the word quango might be said to mean, about Kate Armstrong’s latest article on the single-parent family and child benefits: chatter, chatter, female chatter, unstructured, shimmering, malicious, appreciative, acute, indulgent, shifting, rapid, unpunctuated, glancing, a light bright surface ripple on a deeper current, and Charles sat on, biting his inner lip. ‘You don’t mean to say that this chap Edward Lazenby we keep reading about and hearing on the radio is the same chap as that persistent creep Teddy who used to edit Focus when we were at Cambridge?’ Esther was saying, returning to the guest list, recalling scores not settled a quarter of a century ago: ‘Yes, the very man, he’s a something or other in the DES, he’s a very important chap now, you ought to have a go at him,’ Liz replied, and as she spoke the doorbell rang, and there was the first guest, on the dot of two minutes past nine o’clock, tall, thin, grey, anxious, clutching a bunch of yellow roses, ex-priest turned analyst Joseph O’Toole, standing stranded on the black and white marble tiles, not knowing where to turn, how to divest himself of his coat, to whom to deliver his roses, a lost man, gazing mildly at the unexpected butler, waiting for the arrival of familiar Liz Headleand, who advanced upon him, took the roses, embraced him, restored him, and led him in to Charles, Alix and Esther: a quarter of an hour earlier she had predicted the time of his arrival accurately, to the minute, and now smiled triumphantly as she effected the introductions, a smile of complicity in which Joseph O’Toole, who was acutely aware of his own punctuality problem, was able with a pleasant relief to share. Here he was, safely: the party could begin.

      By half past ten, Deirdre (Molloy) Kavanagh had parted with all her little triangles of tricoloured pastry, taken off her apron, drunk a few glasses of champagne, told several guests that broccoli was out of fashion, and was busily engaged in conversation with a television journalist who had just returned from making a programme for Charles in Iran. He was telling her about the Ayatollah, and she was telling him about her convent days. Their words fluttered between them like lubricious little doves. At Deirdre’s elbow stood the faithless Jonathan Headleand, who was trying to explain to his stepmother’s first husband Edgar why he’d decided, after all his protests, to follow in his father’s footsteps, while simultaneously trying to keep one eye on Deirdre (for whom he felt responsible) and the other on his girlfriend Kate Williams who was being harangued by a Tory backbencher about Marxist infiltration of the Open University. The Open University was also the subject of debate between Alix Bowen and Teddy Lazenby of the Department of Education and Science: Alix’s face was expressing a most delicate mixture of disbelief, disapprobation and polite attention as Teddy, somewhat indiscreetly presuming on their long, if long-interrupted, acquaintance, revealed what were clearly his own opinions on the inadvisability of wasting money on the education of housewives and taxi drivers. In other corners and other rooms, dozens of other topics floated gaily on the lively, slightly choppy waters, their pennants bobbing and fluttering in the end-of-year, the terminal breeze: the approaching steel strike, the brave new era of threatened privatization, the abuse of North Sea oil resources, the situation in Afghanistan, the Annan report, the prospect of a fourth television channel, the viability of Charles’s attempt to conquer the United States, the Cambridge Apostles, the disarray of the Labour Party, the deplorable vogue for Buck’s Fizz as a party drink, the Yorkshire Ripper, the Harrow Road murderer, the Prince of Wales. In a doorway, wedged between a Guardian leader writer and a Kleinian analyst, Alan Headleand and his ex-tutor Otto Werner from the LSE were debating with a fine abstraction and a noble disregard of interruption the question as to whether or not a television programme was a primary product or a service, and whether, by implication or extension, Charles’s production company, Global Information Network (Telex GIN) was allied in ideological terms with the manufacturing or the service industries: with equal commitment Esther Breuer and Jules Griffin (colleague of Liz Headleand) were discussing the nature of ancestral voices in schizophrenic patients and in the Homeric and Biblical epic, and the portrayal of the Holy Ghost in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts.

      Liz, moving from group to group, surveying from the stairway, engaging and disengaging, tacking and occasionally swooping, was pleased with what she saw. They were mixing and mingling, her guests; the young were speaking to the old, men were speaking to women, Left was speaking to Right, art unto science, and only a few impossible old dullards of the financial world had drifted together to talk about pay comparability and public sector borrowing and the GNP. She left them to it: interventionist though she was, she knew the limits of her power. Nothing would stop them, nothing would prise them apart, and she was glad to have them there: she liked to think that she and Charles had a comprehensive acquaintance, that in one house they could assemble representatives of most of the intersecting circles that make up society. One needed a little dullness, to set off the buoyancy, the festivity, the movement.

      And there, at last, was Alix’s husband Brian: she was glad he had turned up, had not spurned her party, had paid her