The Radiant Way. Margaret Drabble

the slight tightening professional impatience of Lady Henrietta’s lip and the altering glaze of her china-blue eye. Honour was satisfied, the courtesies had been observed, they could smile and part. Though I really cannot imagine, thought Liz, as she turned away, rubbing her hands together as though the cold had truly bitten her, as though the Ice Queen had truly touched her, why we continue to ask her round. Is it just because everyone else does, because she is the kind of person that people ask to parties, because her name inscribes itself by automatic writing on guest lists? Are Charles and I really so susceptible to propriety, to the conventional? Do we like to have people with titles at our parties? What on earth is her title? Who is she? What a mystery it is, the way we carry on, thought Liz, as she moved on to more congenial entertainment: remembering, suddenly, the oft-repeated claim of an Austrian refugee analyst of her acquaintance, who frequently and unashamedly rejoiced in having had in his house at one time no less than five Nobel Prize winners, a claim which she had always found endearing, ridiculous, foolish, alarming, comic, in its naïveté, its precision, its ruthlessness: remembering the alarms and excitement of her own early encounters with the famous, the great, the titled, the rich: remembering the ancient yearning to crowd her life with people, with voices, with telephone calls, invitations, children, friends of children: remembering, in short the dread of solitude, the dread of reliving her mother’s unending, inexplicable, still-enduring loneliness: and across these memories, flitting in a half second, as she made her way, for light relief, towards Kate Armstrong, fortifying Kate, came the question – why did Henrietta Latchett, who must have been invited to a hundred parties tonight, who could never have known a lonely evening, why did she choose to come to us? Liz smiled to herself, triumphant, and ploughed on towards Kate.

      Conventional, unconventional: in the last half-hour of 1979 several of Liz and Charles Headleand’s guests attempted to formulate what, for them, had seemed to be the conventions of an eclectic, fragmented, purposeless decade; some attempted to prophesy for the next. The house was full of trend-spotters, from gossip columnist Ivan Warner and irritable feminist Kate Armstrong to Treasury adviser Philip, worried about pension projections in an increasingly elderly society: from information vendor Charles Headleand to epidemiologist Ted Stennett, across whose horizon the science-fiction disease of AIDS was already casting a faint red ominous glow: from forensic psychiatrist Edgar Lintot (who had not yet heard of AIDS, but who had heard rumours about changing views in high places on the sentencing of the criminally insane) to Alix Bowen, worried on a mundane level about the future funding of her own job and on a less selfish level about the implications for the rehabilitation of female offenders of cuts in that funding: from theatre director Alison Peacock, anxious about her Arts Council subsidy, to Representative Public Figure, Sir Anthony Bland, the aptly named Chairman (or so Ivan alleged) of the Royal Commission on Royal Commissions, who was thinking that for various reasons he might have to resign, and from more bodies than one, before the jostling and the hinting pushed him into an undignified retreat.

      Not all were anxious, apprehensive, ill at ease. Many congratulated themselves on having found a new sense of purpose, a new realism: after years of drifting, of idle ebb and flow, there seemed to be a current. Tentatively, some dipped their toes to test the water. Others had already leaped boldly in the expectation that others would follow, that it would prove wise to have been seen to take the plunge first. Old opinions were shed, stuffy woolly shabby old liberal vests and comforters were left piled on the shore. Some shivered in the cold breeze of change: others struck out boldly, with a sense of freedom, glad to be unencumbered by out-of-date gear and padding, glad to cast off notions that had never seemed to themselves to be smart or necessary: naked into the stream, exhilarated, the new emerging race. Cutting, paring, slimming, reducing, rationalizing: out swam the slim hard new streamlined man, in the emperor’s new clothes, out of the gritty carapace, the muddy camouflaged swoon, casting off the old ways, the old crawling, sinking ways. The conventions were changing, assumptions were changing, though not everybody was to enjoy or to survive the metamorphosis, the plunge, the leap into water or air; change is painful, transition is painful, and the social world had not yet reached a stage which could have greeted as conventional, precisely, even at a much-mixed, smart, Bohemian-flavoured cosmopolitan New Year’s Eve party, the excessively raised voices of two journalist-historians, once friends and allies and fellow-contributors to the current of immortal truth and to the New Statesman, now locked in bitter dispute about that ghastly, trailing decaying albatross-corpse of the Left, Public Ownership and Clause 4: ‘You squint-eyed git, you treacherous, turncoat, lying, statistic-faking git,’ shouted Giles, the man of the Left, who appeared to be losing the argument, his voice rising above the more amiable party hubbub in a shriek of despair, a shriek that summoned to his side Liz Headleand, with Kate Armstrong and Ivan Warner in quick attendance. Giles’s straw-yellow hair was fierce above his veined brick-red face, his grey eyes glittered with truculent frustrated aggression, the rage of a thousand ideologically committed drinking sessions in dirty pubs surged in his weeping Camden-Lock-shirted chest. ‘Giles, Giles,’ cried Liz, ‘don’t shout so, it’s nearly the New Year, we can’t bring in the New Year howling like wolves.’ ‘Giles, Giles,’ echoed Kate, throwing restraining arms around him. ‘Wolves!’ shouted Giles drunkenly, ‘wolves, that’s what they are, the pack of them, they’re traitors to the human race, scavengers, look at them, look at them, wolves is too good a word for them, jackals, hyenas, that’s what they are, hyenas!’

      ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Giles, calm down, calm down, come and have a nice Perrier water,’ said Liz, taking his other arm, and, with Kate, attempting to lead him away from the fracas, as one would a child in a playground from its tormentor (for Giles’s antagonist Paul Hargreaves, pale faced, dark suited, silver-grey tied, was smiling calmly with a horrible amusement at this distressing scene): but the desperate Giles was beyond leading, and fell back heavily as he attempted to disengage himself from his two intercessors, crashing into a large fern and some pots of bulbs and sending earth and splashes of champagne over the carpet.

      ‘There go the 1970s,’ commented Hargreaves, ‘there go the drinking seventies,’ a comment which earned him a slap in the eye from Giles’s girlfriend Venetia: ‘Drunkard yourself!’ she shouted, ‘drunkard yourself!’ Whereupon Hargreaves threw his arms around Venetia and kissed her violently, pausing for breath only to make some comment about Public Ownership, as Giles sprawled upon the floor. Ivan Warner was delighted. He looked as though he had stage-managed the whole incident. Liz Headleand stared at the scene with a marked lack of dismay, as Kate Armstrong knelt down and started to dust the earth off Giles, looking up to ask anyone who might be interested about the little blobs of white polystyrene that always seem to come mixed with bulb fibre: ‘What is this stuff?’ asked Kate, ‘I’ve often wondered,’ as she proceeded to re-pot a hyacinth with one hand while stroking Giles’s shoulder with the other. Giles’s girlfriend Venetia, meanwhile, encircled by the arms of Hargreaves, had started to laugh, and Giles began to laugh too: ‘Oh Christ, sorry, Liz, sorry, Kate,’ he declared, as he organized himself into a sitting position, his arms around his knees, ‘I should never have had those two whiskies at the Venables’.’

      ‘Breathe deeply,’ said Liz, ‘breathe deeply and relax, and I’ll get you a Perrier to drink in the New Year.’

      ‘Calm down, calm down, Giles,’ said Hargreaves. ‘Calm down, young chap.’

      ‘Now you keep out of this,’ said Liz and Venetia simultaneously to Hargreaves, while, in another corner of the room, Deirdre Molloy lifted her voice in an Irish lament. ‘Mother, it’s ten to midnight!’ called Sally from the doorway, and Liz, looking around the confusion she had summoned into being, the scattered earth, the scattered people, the murmuring, the singing, the clustering, thought yes, this was a party, yes, this was living rather than not living, this was permitted, this was planned disorder, this was cathartic, this was therapeutic, this was admired misrule. ‘Piano, Aaron, piano!’ she called, and her middle stepson, with his mobile thin white clown’s face, emerged from the crowd and seated himself at the instrument, as Liz called to Deirdre and the butlers to fill glasses and then join the guests for a toast: Jonathan turned on the radio, the eagle-crowned clock over the marble mantelshelf struck, some joined hands and some did not, Aaron struck up Auld Lang Syne, Big Ben struck, some sang and some did not, voices rose straggling, pure and impure, strong and weak, tuneful and