The Radiant Way

by Margaret Drabble

  The Brave New World, it would be, and the new populist and popular medium of television would help to bring it into being. The team itself, with its mixed skills, its mixed social origins, its camaraderie, its common purpose, was a microcosm of what would come about: a forward-looking, forward-moving, dynamic society, full of opportunity, co-operative, classless. The Chinese meal was a classless meal: it brought no echoes of the ancien régime. All over Britain, from Berwick to Broadstairs, from Peterhead to Penzance, Chinese meals were consumed, with or without fried eggs on top. Sound technician sat down with producer, graduate with van driver, artist with engineer. The nation would demand better and better schools, better welfare, better houses, better hospitals, more maternity leave, more nursery schools, more theatres, more swimming pools, more paternity leave, and everything would get better and better all the time. Charles had believed in this vision: he, like Brian and Stephen, had done his National Service, had seen how the rest of the nation lived, had determined even at that period (although never for a moment thinking of not becoming an officer) that he would speak to it all, to the whole undivided nation, as journalist, as broadcaster. (Television hardly existed in those early days.) The Army had radicalized Charles more than Stephen: Stephen had joined it as a radical, and left it as a loner, but Charles – healthy, vigorous, comradely, ambitious – had joined it as a minor public schoolboy of vaguely right-wing views and left it much changed. And it gave him pleasure to sit down with sound technician and lighting man, with van driver and make-up girl: it gave him pleasure to invite them all round to his Harley Street home and sit up late as Liz yawned and laughed and poured glasses of cheap wine and produced, occasionally plates full of spaghetti, occasionally crying babes. A family. And the films they made were the expression of this spirit, this informality, this comradely enterprise. They made films. They could look at what they had made, and feel satisfaction.

  And what had happened to all that? Union rules had happened to it. Overtime, over-manning, disputes, strikes, dissension. As the classless society moved forward, film crew members were no longer satisfied with Chinese meals: they would not sit down for less than a plateful of the best smoked salmon followed by a tournedos. They were no longer content to wait for the right light, for the right shot. They became vain and temperamental, coy and hard to please. They considered themselves an élite: they developed appropriate tastes, appropriate demands. True, Ben Feather continued to prefer chop suey with a fried egg, but he was outvoted, outmoded. One of the new-old régime.

  (The going overnight bed-and-breakfast hotel rate for a member of a BBC film crew in 1985 is, one gathers, £33.47 per night. Take it or leave it.)

  Charles watched this process with very, very slowly accumulating rage. What the hell’s the point of comparing what they earn with what I earn, or what the Director General of the BBC earns, or what the fucking Prime Minister earns, he would splutter, late at night, at Liz. And what the hell’s the point of not working another five minutes? I work, why can’t they work? I’d rather mend the fucking fuse myself, Charles would roar, than lose a whole two hours of work. Don’t they care?

  They had cared, once: what had gone wrong, Charles wanted to know, that they cared no longer, that they were interested only in money, in overtime, in differentials, in negotiating structures, in anything but film? What treachery, what disloyalty, what corruption, what materialism, what vandalism of the good cause, what reactionary, backward-looking, old-fashioned ill-tempered greed. Liz watched the process of Charles’s disillusion less with rage than with interest, with a detached curiosity (for she could not believe that he cared as he did, in fact, care: had herself always been more cynical, more suspicious, of comrades and colleagues and employees: had harboured fewer illusions about the esteem in which she herself was held or not held): she did not think Charles vulnerable, was surprised and rather touched to find him so, in these power struggles of the late sixties and early seventies, as the television unions flexed their muscles, as teachers and nurses and other nice people watched and worried and learned how to strike. It was a distant comedy, to Liz; merely one of many varied and largely displaced manifestations of human aspiration and conflict. It did not touch her to the quick.

  But Charles it touched, and blood flowed. On a Friday night in November in 1972 it flowed, at the end of a day of disaster, when fifty men had come out on strike because a technician had driven a van from one end of a car park to the other to unload some equipment at Charles’s request: work had stopped on several programmes, recriminations had buzzed furiously round high and low places, settlements were offered and rejected and renegotiated and finally accepted, and Charles had raged, stormed, and handed in his resignation. Never again would he submit to such wilful sabotage, such deliberate provocation, such shameful capitulation, he declared, and slammed his working papers boldly down on his Executive Director’s desk and walked out into the night. Out there in the night, in another car park, a certain exchange took place between Charles Headleand, as he made his way towards his BMW, and his one-time colleague Dirk Davis, who appeared to be (but was not) lying in wait. It resulted in a bloody nose: Charles, protecting his two capped front teeth, hit out more violently than he had intended, more accurately than he had known he knew how, and Dirk Davis had gone down against the BMW with a frightening crunch. Remorse had instantly entered the breasts of both parties, fortunately, and they had tenderly brushed one another down, each admitting a measure of guilt, leaning breathless against the gleaming dark-blue bonnet, testing teeth, dabbing at noses, spitting in the dirt, as far away the rockets of Bonfire Night rose into the clear, dark, crisp, leaf-scented air: ‘Fuck it,’ said Dirk, mopping blood from nose and split upper lip on to his beige check cashmere scarf, ‘fuck the whole fucking lot of you, fuck the whole fucking mad country, you fucking near broke my fucking nose.’ ‘You should learn to keep your fucking mouth shut,’ said Charles, morosely, reassured that his caps were still in place, but disturbed by the muffled banging in his rib cage and the sour prickling of his skin. And both stood, for a moment, silent, on the uneven rubble of a makeshift car park in East Acton: a moment of truce and dismay: of intimacy and disarray: and above them slowly arose a great distant display of softly exploding quiet bruises of green flowers, silver stars, red stripes of flame, great arcs of golden rain. They gazed, subdued. ‘I told the kids I’d be back to light the bonfire,’ said Dirk glumly. ‘Too fucking late now.’ ‘Too late,’ echoed Charles. ‘Too late, too late.’ A smell of gunpowder floated in the night air. Acrid, final, pure. There were no witnesses. ‘Where’s your car?’ asked Charles. Dirk nodded towards it: it stood meekly, waiting, embarrassed, mute. Tacitly, no word spoken, Charles and Dirk agreed that no more should be said: that each would forget the incident: that each would drive off into the darkness. They would for ever avoid one another, for ever avoid another such personal confrontation, would fight on with different weapons, different warriors. They would not speak again, they would never again mingle blood or earth or eat salt together or look one another in the eye.

  Charles never made another film. He never completed the film on which he had been working that night. He persisted in proffering his resignation, went off, formed an independent programme-making production company (the parent company of Global Information Network), busied himself simultaneously with television politics; but within eighteen months was back with his old consortium, at a greatly increased salary, as Executive Director. He rose steadily, aggressively, through the hierarchy until there was nowhere left in the UK for him to go, and now he is in New York. He very rarely thinks, now, of his one-time ambition to speak to the whole nation, in a language the whole nation would understand: the language of film. He accepts that he was wrong to dream that this was possible or desirable. There is open war, now, and he considers that he did not declare it. But he sometimes remembers, sadly, subversively, the Chinese meal, the fried egg: he sometimes even wonders what happened to Ben Feather, to Dirk Davis, to Lindsay Potter
. . . .

  And occasionally, as he jogs to the mocking rhythm of Widdecombe Fair, he thinks that the 1980s have come a little late for him: five years younger than the Prime Minister he may be, but is that young enough? An uneasiness grips him. His life is expensive. His salary is high, but his life is expensive. Henrietta is an expensive woman, and much of her money seems to be tied up with her children. He has five children of his own. Obscurely, unfairly, guiltily, he blames Liz. He tells his solicitor to tell Liz to sell the house. Liz, through her solicitor, refuses, or at least temporizes. Sometimes he telephones Liz directly at odd hours of day and night, for they are still on speaking terms, but she refuses to speak seriously, saying merely that she hasn’t found a suitable little home in Kentish Town and is too busy to look, and anyway isn’t it a bit short-sighted of him even to think of selling such a valuable property? She even has the cheek to mention Capital Gains Tax. Charles is fairly sure that Liz doesn’t know what Capital Gains Tax is, but nevertheless he is a little shaken to find that she has even thought of it, and wonders who is advising her, apart from her solicitor. It can’t possibly be Esther or Alix, he correctly supposes: has she perhaps a lover? A mercenary lover? Liz herself is by no means indifferent to wealth: her attitude to it is a little eccentric, a little high handed, but it is not an attitude of indifference. A mercenary lover. A perfectly serious possibility, he supposes. Liz is not likely to remain unmarried long. He jogs on, despondently, determined that the lover shall never take up residence in Harley Street.

  Liz, for her part, intends to be reasonable about the house, intends to be reasonable about Henrietta, intends to behave like a rational adult, independent woman, but finds that this is not as easy as she had hoped. She finds herself responding, pettily, irritably, emotionally. She does not succumb: she has observed and cross-questioned too many extreme cases to allow herself to succumb. She detects the symptoms early, checks them, controls them, but they continue to recur, in a mild but persistent form, and she as mildly and persistently continues to dismiss them. This is quite hard work, and absorbs some of the energy which is usually directed towards her professional commitments. She has managed, by reasoning with herself, to suppress the attacks of financial anxiety that threatened her when Charles originally came up with the notion of divorce: she knows that in her case it is unnecessary, a mere reflex tic, a vestigial fear, a displaced fear. (Nevertheless she cannot help sounding ill-tempered when Charles mentions her income, or the selling of the house.) She knows that, by a mixture of instinct and management and luck, she is extremely well placed to face the 1980s: better than Charles with his vast salary, for she is five years younger than Charles, and considerably fitter and in a less cut-throat line of operation. (Charles is worried: she, his wife of twenty years, can smell worry across the Atlantic.) She is so well placed that she almost suspects herself of an exceptional cunning, of having foreknown that she would find herself here, without Charles, in 1980, with her own life still to consolidate. The new government, although she did not vote for it and frequently criticizes it, suits her well, much better than it suits Cliff Harper, her brother-in-law, who did vote for it. She is not threatened by cuts in public spending, by the decline of the National Health Service, by the new and growing emphasis on privatization: her income is derived from a judicious blend of public and private practice. She believes in the National Health Service, in public welfare, of course (is she not a close friend of Alix Bowen?) but she also recognizes, as Alix does not, that the private sector must encourage experiment, excellence, variation of treatment: naturally, some of her most interesting patients are from the private sector. The son of a cabinet minister, the adopted daughter of a millionaire, the (presumed) grandson of a philandering painter. She does not feel that she is betraying the public cause when she treats these patients. She believes she is offering therapy to those in need. Which, of course, she is. It is difficult to convey this in Alix Bowen’s terms but Liz Headleand is, at least in her own terms, an honest woman.

  And this is why she is obliged, at this odd, transitional stage of her life, to recall memories that she would rather sweep under the carpet. Professionally, temperamentally, she knows it is bad for her to sweep things under the carpet. And therefore, having reassured herself that she has herself no acute financial anxieties, she is obliged to recall certain details of her childhood: the threadbare, thrifty, dimly lit, pinched, highly polished home of her childhood. It had not been comfortable, the house in Abercorn Avenue. It had been dark, and cold: low-watt electric bulbs had to be extinguished each time one left a room, a corridor, nothing could be left lit or burning. Bedrooms were unheated: there was a single-bar electric fire in the dining-room which Shirley and Liz would carry secretly upstairs in bitter weather. They would sleep in socks, in jerseys, wrapped up in dressing-gowns. Nothing in the house seemed to have any softness, any warmth in it: the bedcovers were shiny, the cushions were shiny, the lavatory paper (which was strictly rationed, to so many sheets a day) was both coarse and shiny. Everything was rationed, except the water from the tap. Rita Ablewhite had not thought of that.

  Rita Ablewhite liked a high gloss. One of the bizarre duties of Liz’s infancy consisted of polishing her dead father’s shoes. They stood on a shoe rack, in the kitchen, and once a week they had to be polished. There was a putting-on brush, and a taking-off brush, and a duster. A ritual. Liz disliked it intensely. Shirley would not do it. Shirley refused. But Liz, who was playing a waiting game, continued to polish the shoes until she was fifteen, sixteen. And it was at this age – fifteen, sixteen – that it began to occur to Liz Ablewhite that maybe her mother had once been in service? She never dared to ask, but such a history would certainly have explained some of her mother’s odd domestic behaviour, her strange, below-stairs behaviour, so out of place in a three-bedroomed, bay-windowed, 1920-built suburban semi-detached house.

  It would have explained, for example, the cleaning of the silver. There was only one piece of silver in Abercorn Avenue (apart from a few teaspoons and one gravy ladle): it was a mysterious round object which sat in the front room on a small side-table. It stood about six inches high, had two silver circular handles like loop earrings which could be rotated in their holders, and two detachable rims, one a flat silver disc, the other a grooved and slotted barricade, an inch high, which sat inside the flat disc. The round base of this object was of cracked and elderly wood. On one of its silver sides it bore a device, an engraving, in the form of a mailed fist: on the other a monogram which Liz, over the years, gradually deciphered as an interlinked S, H and O. There was also a hallmark of four digits, displaying a tiny anchor, a tiny lion, a letter Z and an illegible squiggle which might once have been an arrow. The function of the object was by no means clear to Liz and Shirley Ablewhite, but then it did not occur to them that it might have a function: it was clearly a symbol rather than a domestic utensil. Late Victorian? Edwardian? These were questions that only raised themselves retrospectively. But silver it was, solid silver, for so, Rita Ablewhite informed them, the hallmark proclaimed. It had to be taken to pieces and polished, with a pink soapy paste, then washed in hot soapy water, then dried on a special dark-yellow cloth. Liz enjoyed the silver more than the shoes. It was more rewarding. It came up well. But what was it? Whence had it come? How had it made its way to Abercorn Avenue? These were mysteries that found no answer: they posed questions that could not even be asked.