The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

significance, both acknowledged, though Liz could not have said what it was. Brian did not like parties, according to Alix, and had expressed fears that he would know nobody at the Headleands’, but this was not so, for he had already engaged himself with his habitual courtesy with old Sir Anthony. She saw him as he listened attentively to Sir Anthony; she caught his eye, waved at him across the sea of heads, abandoned him to the tide: he was an old friend of Otto Werner’s, whom he could seek out if in need of relief. The tide was flowing to the Right, according to Charles: could one feel, here, now, its tug, its undertow? She paused, wondered. Brian was a gentle-man of the Left; what of this new breed of non-gentlemen of the Right? She moved on, overhearing talk of broccoli, of death in Kabul, of the phenomenal transatlantic success of Pett Petrie’s new novel, and there was Petrie himself, talking to that little monster Ivan about his meeting with Norman Mailer, whooping with laughter, and hitting his own bald head with emphatic glee. There was Charles, talking to the new proprietor of the Informer (plotting no doubt) and there was her daughter Sally arm in arm with Nat Higsby from the Tavistock: they seemed to be singing a duet. There was Roy Strangeways, who was now, implausibly, surely prematurely, a High Court judge, talking to – no, it couldn’t be, but it was. Liz fell silent in mid-word of a vague murmured greeting to stare. Yes, it was, how extraordinary, it was her own ex-patient Hilda Stark, disease, comedienne and would-be infanticide, whose career had been violently interrupted when in a fit of madness (to put it nontechnically) she had nearly strangled her baby in its cradle: and here she was, laughing and drinking champagne, a guest; how improper, how indiscreet; was she married to somebody, had she come as somebody’s wife? How brave of her, how bold of her, was she perhaps even now reciting to Roy the interesting medical and legal details of her case? There she stood, in a dove-grey suede dress, looped and hung with a dozen necklaces of amethyst and rock crystal and pearl, her thick black-grey hair piled heavily, pinned with silver, attending a party in the very house where as patient she once in many hour-long sessions had disclosed to Liz on the ground floor the very secrets of her murderous mother’s heart. How could she have come here, who could have brought her, and would Roy feel compelled to divulge his and Liz’s own smaller, milder secrets in return? Should she intervene, should she break them up, or should she ignore her uninvited guest, pretend, professionally, never to have set eyes on her before? As she considered this, Hilda intercepted her gaze, saluted her, and majestically, graciously, demonstratively, voluptuously blew a kiss across the room: Liz waved back, less flamboyantly but with equal composure, for what did it matter, after all, that Hilda Stark was there, was it not a tribute to them both, to the efficacy of the cure? Hilda brought no shadows with her, she smiled innocently in her dove grey; the scandalous rumours had been, as Liz had predicted, forgotten. It was a credit to them all. And the nearly murdered baby, how was it, where was it, Liz wondered, and found herself involuntarily doing a head count of her own stepchildren and children: she could see Jonathan, Alan and Sally; her younger daughter Stella was away in Florence studying Italian, for her A levels, and staying safely and respectably as paying guest with art-historical friends of Esther; but where was her middle stepson, Aaron? She had not seen him for an hour or more, he had been here earlier, had he left in a fit of boredom, was he sulking in his bedroom, she asked herself, and on cue, he appeared, at the bend of the hall stairs, beneath the fake ancestor, waving down and shouting at her: ‘Liz, Liz,’ he called, ‘it’s the telephone, it’s Stella, she wants to wish you a Happy New Year, she’s on the upstairs line.’

      The energy generated from running upstairs and laughing with Stella in distant Florence flowed over into the impulse to ring, in turn, her own mother: a pointless act, but one that nevertheless in the context seemed pious, necessary, propitiatory, and a gesture at least towards her sister, who bore so much heavier a filial burden, who would (in theory at least) be pleased to know that Liz had remembered. When Liz came downstairs again to her party, after a ritual exchange (how could her sister bear such intercourse? how could it go on?) she found that she had lost her velocity. The brisk social wind that had driven her lightly from guest to guest had dropped, stilled by telephonic contact with the tiny scratching clicking silence of the voiceless house of the long ordeal of her childhood: she found herself becalmed, for a whole dull stretch, talking to old Peter Binns, a charming old boy, but a bore, and so slow of speech that Liz could hardly restrain herself from finishing all his ponderous sentences. When she finally shook herself away, she found herself sailing into yet more stagnant waters, for there, directly in her way, unavoidable, smiling passively, uncomfortably, yet unavoidably, was Lady Henrietta, dutifully offering herself for an exchange with her hostess. Lady Henrietta knew what was right: everything about her was right, from her tightly bound dark hair to her dark-blue satin slippers. The sight of her filled Liz with a subdued and dreary panic. Henrietta (Hetty to her friends, of whom Liz was not one) embarrassed her, she could never say why: she represented pain, failure, tedium, though not in her own person: somehow, magically, she managed to transfer these attributes to those with whom she conversed, while herself remaining poised and indeed complacent, secure of admiration. Liz had never admired, and had at times expressed somewhat freely (and in her own view wittily) her lack of response to Henrietta’s frigid style and vapid conversation, but nevertheless felt herself, in Henrietta’s presence, rendered almost as dull as Henrietta, and moreover uneasily aware that in other houses, in other milieux, at a distance, in other circles, she had seen Henrietta sparkling, laughing, surrounded by life – vacuous life, feverish small talk, no doubt, but life – a life that froze in Liz as she contemplated her guest’s stiff blue taffeta gown (this was surely a gown, not a dress, and, not even English, probably French), her exposed white bosom, her diamond necklace (well, probably diamonds, why not?), her high white forehead, her thin dark-red lips. Henrietta’s brow was high, and her hair was scraped back from it and secured by an intricate velvet ribbon in a smooth, elaborate chignon: a Bambi head, a skull head, a too, too thin head, an over-bred head, a painful head. Liz’s own forehead was villainously low, coarsely low. She did not know how to address Henrietta, she felt the fault her own, she knew herself to be disadvantaged. A chill, heavy waste of water lay between them, and in it floated the drowned empty skins of past attempts at rapport. Across this, the neat Henrietta politely presented a hand and a cheek. Cheek brushed against cheek. Each muttered some conventional phrase. It appeared that more was required and Liz, resenting the inanity thus forced upon her even as it passed her lips, found herself saying ‘And how are you looking forward to the 1980s?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ said Henrietta, smiling meaninglessly, confirming Liz’s view that she never listened to a word that Liz said to her. Silence fell, during which Liz inspected Henrietta’s blue dress: it was poutily, boldly cut, made of the kind of shot, stiff, shiny non-absorbent kind of fabric that Liz herself avoided, for it made her sweat; indeed it made her sweat to look at it. She was given to sweat: Henrietta, clearly, not. Perhaps the upper classes did not sweat? She was herself, biologically, a peasant, but was rarely made to feel this to be an eccentricity as she now felt. Gazing at the blue fabric, she noted that Ivan, ever present when least wanted, was intently watching this less than interesting encounter from a position just behind and below Henrietta’s left shoulder. His frankly delighted countenance spurred her on to effort: ‘I myself,’ she heard herself saying, ‘am very much looking forward to going to Japan for the first time. Have you ever been to Japan?’

      ‘No,’ said Lady Henrietta, unhelpfully. Ivan laughed.

      ‘I am attending,’ continued Liz, ‘a conference.’

      ‘Really?’ said Lady Henrietta. ‘How long do you go for?’

      This seemingly innocuous question acted upon Liz with the effect of an instant anaesthetic: as she began to answer, she could feel her jaw growing rigid in mid-word. ‘Two weeks,’ she managed to articulate, and then stood there, mouth clamped, feet rooted, as though turned to a pillar of salt, as though the deep deep boredom of childhood had reclaimed her, had rendered her helpless and speechless and powerless, the child in the attic, praying for time to pass and blood to flow. Which, of course, momentarily, it did: ‘Two weeks,’ she boldly and brightly continued, breaking the trancelike stillness with a frisky movement of her head and braceleted right arm, ‘yes, two weeks, in Kyoto and Osaka, it should be quite fascinating, quite an opportunity to see a completely different culture, of course it relates to our own work at the Institute in a very particular way, it seems that there has been a considerable amount of research done