Читать книгу The Radiant Way - Margaret Drabble - Страница 5

New Year’s Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous moment, for those who pay attention to portents. Guests were invited for nine. Some are already on their way, travelling towards Harley Street from outlying districts, from Oxford and Tonbridge and Wantage, worried already about the drive home. Others are dining, on the cautious assumption that a nine o’clock party might not provide adequate food. Some are uncertainly eating a sandwich or a slice of toast. In front of mirrors women try on dresses, men select ties. As it is a night of many parties, the more social, the more gregarious, the more invited of the guests are wondering whether to go to Harley Street first, or whether to arrive there later, after sampling other offerings. A few are wondering whether to go at all, whether the festive season has not after all been too tiring, whether a night in slippers in front of the television with a bowl of soup might not be a wiser choice than the doubtful prospect of a crowded room. Most of them will go: the communal celebration draws them, they need to gather together to bid farewell to the 1970s, they need to reinforce their own expectations by witnessing those of others, by observing who is in, who is out, who is up, who is down. They need one another. Liz and Charles Headleand have invited them, and obediently, expectantly, they will go, dragging along their tired flat feet, their aching heads, their over-fed bellies and complaining livers, their exhausted opinions, their weary small talk, their professional and personal deformities, their doubts and enmities, their blurring vision and thickening ankles, in the hope of a miracle, in the hope of a midnight transformation, in the hope of a new self, a new life, a new, redeemed decade.

Alix Bowen has always known that she will have to go to the party, because she is one of Liz Headleand’s two closest friends, and she has pledged her support, for what it is worth. She has promised, even, to go early, but cannot persuade her husband Brian to go early with her. A couple of hours of any party is enough for me, Brian has said, and we’ll have to stay until midnight, so I’m certainly not turning up before ten. All right, I’ll go alone, said Alix. She thought Brian was quite reasonable not to want to go early. She herself is not a reasonable person, she suspects, a suspicion confirmed that evening in the bathroom as she tries, out of respect to Liz’s party, to apply a little of a substance called Fluid Foundation to the winter-dry skin of her face. This is what people do before parties: she has seen them doing it on television: indeed, she used to do it herself when she was young, when she had no need of such substances, before she reverted so inexorably to her ancestral type.

The Fluid Foundation comes in a little opaque beige plastic container, and is labelled, in gold lettering, Teint Naturel. She bought it a year ago and recalls that it cost a great deal of money. She uses it infrequently. Now she cautiously squeezes the container. Nothing happens. Is it dry? Is it empty? How can one tell? She squeezes again, and this time a great glob of Teint Naturel extrudes itself from the narrow aperture on to her middle finger. She gazes at it in mild dislike. It glistens, pinky-brown, faintly obscene, on her finger. Common sense, reason, tell her to wash this away down the wash bowl, but thrift forbids. Thrift is one of Alix’s familiars. Thrift does not often leave her side. Thrift has nearly killed her on several occasions, through the agency of old sausages, slow-punctured tyres, rusty blades. Thrift now recommends that she apply the rest of this blob to her complexion rather than wastefully flush it away. Thrift disguised as Reason speciously suggests than an excess of Fluid Foundation on one’s face, unlike a poisoned sausage, will cause no harm. Thrift apologizes, whingeing, for the poisoned sausage, reminding Alix that she ate it twenty years ago, when she had no money and needed the sausage.

Alix hesitates, then splats the rest of the glob on to her face and begins to work it in, angrily. She blames the manufacturers for the poor design of the container: probably deliberate, she reflects, probably calculated to make people splurge out far more than they need of the stuff. She is slightly cheered by the thought of how little reward they would reap from their dishonesty if all consumers were as moderate as she. (She wonders, in parenthesis, how much of the nation’s income is spent on cosmetics, and whether the statistics will be provided in the New Year issue of Social Trends.) She is more cheered, although at first puzzled, by the fact that as she works the excess of Teint Naturel on her skin, her appearance begins to improve. Instead of turning brick-red or prawn-cocktail-pink, as she had feared, she is turning a pleasant beige, a natural beige, she is beginning to look the same colour that people look in television advertisements. A pleasant, mat, smooth beige. It is remarkable. So this, perhaps, is what the manufacturers had always intended? She apologizes to Thrift for having been angry, then remembers that it was Thrift that had dictated her previous parsimonious, sparing applications, and is confused.

She gazes at herself in wonder. Vanished are her healthy pink cheeks, her slightly red winter nose, her mole, her little freckles and blemishes: she is smooth, new made. She dabs a little powder on top, and stands back to admire the effect. It is pleasing, she decides. She wonders what it will look like by midnight. Will she be transformed into an uneven, red-faced, patchy, blotchy clown? An ugly sister? Alix has always felt rather sorry for the poor competitive disappointed Ugly Sisters. Indeed, she feels sorry for almost everybody. It is one of her weaknesses. But she does not feel sorry for her friend Liz Headleand. As she struggles into her blue dress, she wonders idly if she is so fond of Liz because she does not have to feel sorry for her, or if she does not have to feel sorry for her because she is so fond of her? Or are the two considerations quite distinct? She feels she is on the verge of some interesting illumination here, but has to abandon it in order to search for Brian, to ask him to fasten the back of her dress: if she does not leave soon, she will be late for her early arrival, and moreover she has promised to meet Esther Breuer at eight thirty precisely on the corner of Harley Street and Weymouth Street. They plan to effect a double entry.

Esther Breuer has decided to walk to the intersection of Harley Street and Weymouth Street. She often walks alone at night. She walks from her flat at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, along the Harrow Road, under various stretches of motorway, past the Metropole Hotel where she calls in to buy herself a drink in the Cosmo-Cocktail Bar (she is perversely fond of the Metropole Hotel), and then through various increasingly handsome although gloomy back streets, until she arrives at the arranged corner. As she approaches it, she cannot at first see Alix, but she believes that Alix will be there, and indeed momently she is: they converge, Esther from the west, Alix from the south, and moderate their pace (Esther accelerating slightly, Alix marginally slowing down) so that they meet upon the very corner itself. They are both delighted by this small achievement of coordination. They congratulate themselves upon it, as they walk north towards Liz’s house in Harley Street, towards the invisible green of Regent’s Park.

Liz Headleand sits at her dressing-table in her dressing-room. Her gold watch and her digital clock agree that it is nineteen minutes past eight. At half past eight she will go downstairs to see what is happening in the kitchen, to see if Charles is in his place, to see if any of her children or stepchildren have yet descended, to prepare to receive her guests. Meanwhile, she has eleven minutes in hand. She knows that she ought to ring her mother, that there is still a faint possibility that she might ring her mother, but that possibility is already fading, and as the admonitory red glare of the clock clicks silently to 20.20 it gasps and dies within her. She will not ring her mother. She has not time.

Instead, she sits there and for a moment contemplates the prospect of her party, the gathering of her guests. She knows them, their reluctance, their need, their larger hopes. She can hear their conversations, in cars, in bedrooms, in restaurants, at other parties, as time draws them nearer to her, to one another, to her house. She eats a pistachio nut, and fastens her locket. New Year’s Eve. A significant night, at least in journalistic terms, and there would be journalists here this evening, no doubt comparing their analyses of the bygone seventies, their predictions for the 1980s. And for her, too, significant in other, superstitious ways. Since childhood, since her early school days, New Year’s Eve had possessed for her a mournful terror: she had elected it to represent the Nothingness which was her own life, the solid, cheerful festival which had seemed to be the lives of others. New Year’s Eve in those early years had possessed a dull religious sheen, a pewter glimmer, which by much effort and polishing and dedication of the will could bring her a little light, a little hope, a little perseverance: but she had longed for the flames and the candles, the cut glass and the singing. Disproportionately she had longed, in the interminable wastes of adolescence, in the grey and monotonous steppes, and some of the longing had attached itself to this night, this one night of the year, when others (she knew from schoolfriends, from the radio, from novels), when others went to parties and celebrated whatever was about to be. She had longed to be invited to a party, a longing which presented itself to her as a weakness and a wickedness, as well as an impossibility. She had comforted herself with her own severity. Finally, after long years, she had become a party-goer. How those oblong cards with her own name upon them had delighted her! Crazily, disproportionately. And now she was a party-giver as well as a party-goer.

Her dressing-table glitters and shimmers, it is festive like the night. It is white and gold, quietly ornate. Beneath the protective glass lies, imprisoned, flattened, a circle of Venetian lace, elaborate, fine, rose embossed, cream coloured, expensive, hand worked, beautiful, useless: a gift, though not of this year’s giving. On the table lie a silver-backed hand-mirror, a silver-backed brush, an ivory paper-knife with a silver handle. Over a little carved corner of the large oval mirror into which she absently stares, not seeing herself, hang necklaces: amber, pearl, paste. She rarely wears them: she wears her little locket, superstitiously. The blond shells of the pistachio nuts, with their seductive little green gleaming cracks, repose in a small Sheffield plate dish on a stem, an oval dish which echoes, satisfactorily, elegantly, the shape of the nuts: the surface of its lining is tinily scratched, pitted and polished, golden, antique, dull but shining. Behind the dish stands this year’s Christmas gift, from her eldest stepson Jonathan: a tiny, cut-glass snowdrop vase which holds a posy of cold hothouse snowdrops, white and green, delicately streaked, fragile, hopeful, a promise of futurity. Liz Headleand is known to like cut glass, so people give it to her, on occasions, pleased to have their gift problem thus simply solved.

Liz Headleand stares into the mirror, as though entranced. She does not see herself or the objects on her dressing-table. The clock abruptly jerks to 20.21.

She and Charles have never given a party on New Year’s Eve before. They have given many parties in their time, but on New Year’s Eve they have always gone out to the gatherings of others – sometimes to several gatherings in the course of the evening, and some years separately, not always meeting even for the magic chimes. A modern marriage, and some of its twenty-one years had been more modern than others. Maybe, Liz reflects (for this is what she contemplates, through the oval mirror), maybe this is why they decided to have such a party, this year, at the end of this decade: as a sign that they had weathered so much, and were now entering a new phase? A phase of tranquillity and knowledge, of acceptance and harmony, when jealousies and rivalries would drop away from them like dead leaves? Well, why not? After twenty-one years, one is allowed a celebration. Charles is fifty, she herself is forty-five. There is a symmetry about this, about their relationship with the clock of the century, that calls for celebration. And therefore grumbling couples complain in cars on their way to Harley Street from the Home Counties and beg one another not to let them drink too much: therefore Esther and Alix meet and laugh on a street corner a few hundred yards away: therefore stepchildren muster and stepparents-in-law assemble: therefore Liz Headleand’s mother sits alone, ever alone, untelephoned, distant, uncomprehending, uncomprehended, remote, mad, long mad, imprisoned, secret, silent, silenced, listening to the silence of her house.

Charles and Liz, naturally, did not construct the notion of a New Year’s Eve party in this spirit, as a portent, as a symbol, as a landmark in the journey of their lives. As far as Liz can remember the idea came upon them rather more casually, one Saturday morning in early November over breakfast. Charles and Liz rarely breakfast together, they are both far too busy: Liz often sees patients at eight in the morning and Charles’s working hours are wildly irregular. But at weekends, they attempt to rendezvous over the Oxford marmalade, and on this occasion had succeeded. Charles, eating his toast, opening his mail, had suddenly exclaimed with a parody of fury, ‘Christ, it’s the Venables again!’ ‘What have they done to you now?’ she had mildly enquired, looking up from a photocopy of an article on The Compulsion to Public Prayer: a study of religious neurosis in a post-Christian society which she had just received in her own post, and Charles had said, ‘Asked us to a New Year’s Eve party.’

‘What, now, in November?’

He pushed the invitation over to her: she regarded it with mock distaste.

‘It’s got pictures of little cocktail glasses and tinsel spots on,’ she observed.

‘I could see that for myself,’ said Charles.

‘I refuse to invite them to dinner,’ she said.

‘Of course we don’t have to invite them to dinner. Ludicrous couple. Ludicrous.’

Liz smiled. She enjoyed Charles’s little displays of anger, especially when she was in sympathy with them – as, on matters such as the Venables, she usually was. A good judge of character, Charles, she would sometimes with surprise reflect.

‘I think we should retaliate,’ she said, a few minutes later, after skimming through public prayer and the letters page of The Times. ‘I think we should have a New Year’s Eve party of our own. That would serve them right.’

‘It certainly would,’ Charles agreed. ‘Yes, it certainly would.’ And they smiled at one another, collusively, captivated by this broad new concept of social vengeance, and began to plan their guest list: they owed hospitality to half London, they agreed, it was time for a party, it would kill many birds with one big stone. A vision of dead, flattened, feathered guests rose in both their minds, as they plotted and planned.

That was how it had been, perhaps that was where it had started, thought Liz, as she stared into past and future, before jerking herself back into the present, which now stood at 20.22. The red clock from the bedroom reflected in the dressing-room mirror, at an interesting, an unlikely angle. Her eyes focused upon her own image. She looked all right, she concluded, without much interest. She bared her teeth at herself, pointlessly. Her teeth were quite large, but there was not much she could do about that now. Her interest in cosmetics, like that of her friend Alix Bowen, was minimal, but, like Alix Bowen, she decided that it was after all a festive occasion, and she began at this late moment to apply a little mascara. Her mascara container, like Alix’s Fluid Foundation, was rarely called upon, and appeared to have dried up. She licked the curved brush, and tried again. A big black dry grainy nodule stuck itself unobligingly to her lashes. Impatiently she reached for a tissue and wiped it off. It left a small black smear. She licked the tissue and removed the black smear, restoring herself to her former state which had been, and still was, in her own view, quite satisfactory.

20.23. In a few minutes she would go down. She could have borrowed some mascara from her daughter Sally, but it was too late. She should have rung her mother in Northam, but it was too late. Seven minutes of solitude she had, and then she would descend. As she sat there, she experienced a sense of what seemed to be preternatural power. She had summoned these people up, these ghosts would materialize, even now they were converging upon her in their finery at her bidding, each of them willing to surrender a separate self for an evening, to eat, to drink, to talk, to exchange embraces, to wait for the witching hour. Soon their possible presences would become real presences, and here, under this roof, at her command, patterns would form and dissolve and form again, dramas would be enacted, hard and soft words exchanged, friendships formed, acquaintances renewed. The dance would be to her tune. A pity, in a way, that the dancing would be merely metaphorical: this was a house large enough to accommodate dancing, but their friends were not of the dancing classes, would gaze in astonishment, alarm, sophisticated horror, intellectual condemnation, at dancing in a private house . . . another year, perhaps, for the dancing. This year, the dying year, the social dance would suffice.

It would be a large assembly: some two hundred had accepted, and more would come. She had encouraged her stepchildren and her daughter Sally to invite their friends: they would add colour, diversion, eccentricity, noise. She liked the mixing of ages, she even liked a little friction, and friction there would be: Ivan Warner alone was usually enough to raise the temperature of any social gathering to conflagration point, and Ivan in conjunction with Charles’s Fleet Street friends and television moguls, with a few publishers and poets and novelists, with an actress or two, with a clutch of psychologists and psychotherapists and art historians and civil servants and lawyers and extremely quarrelsome politicians, would surely manage to set the place on fire? Surely this night the unexpected would happen, surely she had summoned up the unexpected. She had, of late, felt herself uncannily able to predict the next word, the next move, in any dialogue: she could hear and take in three conversations at once: she could see remotely as through a two-way mirror the private lives of her patients, sometimes of her friends: she had felt reality to be revealed to her at times in flashes beyond even the possibility of rational calculation: had felt in danger (why danger?) of too much knowledge, of a kind of powerlessness and sadness that is born of knowledge: for these reasons, perhaps, was it that she had decided to multiply the possibilities so recklessly, to construct a situation beyond her own grasping? A situation of which not even she could guess the outcome? Had she wished to test her powers, or, a little, to lose control and stand aside? To be defeated, honourably, by the multiplicity of the unpredictable, instead of living with the power of her knowingness? With the limits of the known?

She had thought, back in November, that the party was merely a celebration, a celebration of having survived, so long, with Charles: twenty-one years, unique in the circle of their acquaintance. Battle and bloodshed and betrayal lay behind them, and now they met peacefully in this large house, and slept peacefully in their separate rooms, and met at weekends over the marmalade, and would continue to do so until Charles’s new appointment took him, in a couple of months, to New York. He would return to visit her, she would fly out to visit him, they would speak on the telephone, they would not miss one another. This was understood. Nobody expected Liz to uproot herself, like a woman, like a wife, and follow her husband to America: she was expected to stay where she was, pursuing her own career and pursuing her own inner life, whatever that might be. A modern marriage. Charles and Liz Headleand. Liz knew how they were regarded: as a powerful couple who, by breaking the rules, had become representative. They represented a solidity, a security, a stamp of survival on the unquiet experiments of two decades, a proof that two disparate spirits can wrestle and diverge and mingle and separate and remain distinct, without a loss of brightness, without a loss of self, without emasculation, submission, obligation. And the image, the public image, is not wholly false, although naturally its firm talismanic outlines conceal a great deal of past pain and confusion, of dirty bargaining, of occasional childishnesses, of outright disagreements: and the present is not wholly peaceful. If it were, it would be dead, Liz tells herself. Conflict is invigorating, it renews energy. So she tells herself. She disapproves of a great deal of Charles’s life, these days; she thinks his ambitions misplaced, his goals suspect, his methods dangerous, his new political alignments deplorable: but she is loyal to Charles, to Charles himself, to the man that these manifestations in her view misrepresent. She believes in Charles, in her own fashion, and believes that he believes in her. Their past, with all its secrets, is solid behind them, and cannot be disowned. Their union has a high, embattled, ideological glamour; their dissent is a bond. Her loyalty, she believes, is worth a great deal to Charles: it gives him plausibility.

Or is this line of thought simply a rationalization of the truth, which is that these days she and Charles disagree about almost everything?

A celebration, a farewell party. Charles will be away for at least a year. She is glad he is going, she thinks. The strain of living up to the lofty concept of marriage that they have invented is tiring, at times, and she is a busy woman. A year off will not come amiss. It will give her peace, privacy

She eats another nut, and needlessly, absently, combs her hair. She finds it hard to think clearly about Charles. The time span of the thinking is too long, it makes the present moment arbitrary, a point on a graph that is in itself meaningless. She looks down at her shopping-and-memo list, to find a nearer focus. Perrier water, it says. Poinsettia. Prunes. Remind Deirdre about tabasco. Japanese seminar, Metropole Hotel. Ask Ivan about R. P. R. P.? Who or what was R. P.? She must have known last night, while constructing this list. Maybe it will come back to her, when she sees Ivan. She suspects that Charles suspects that she had once had an affair with Ivan, but of course she had not, though she concedes that Ivan is so unpleasant that only a degree of past sexual intimacy could plausibly explain the kind of relationship that he and Liz have over the years established. Charles had not wished to invite Ivan to the party. Wherever that man goes, there is trouble, he said. But that is the point of him, Liz had replied. Liz prided herself on her tolerance of Ivan’s appalling behaviour. Anyway, she said, we’ll have to ask him, or he’ll be even ruder about us in his next article. I don’t give a damn about Ivan’s ridiculous rag, said Charles, but of course he did, he cared much more than she did, and with reason, for Ivan usually managed to deliver her some backhanded compliment, whereas Charles always got it in the neck: ‘HEADLEAND CRASHES HEADLONG’ had been the headline of Ivan’s latest piece of gossip, which had consisted of a dangerous account of Charles’s behaviour at a meeting of a board of directors, laced with unfounded but inventive innuendo about a country house which he and Liz were said to be purchasing as a tax dodge. There had also been offensive remarks about Charles’s ageing toothless bite. Charles had been particularly annoyed about the toothlessness, she could tell, although he tried to conceal it: he had in fact been without his two front teeth that week, while having their thirty-year-old caps replaced, caps that marked a heroic accident long ago in a swimming pool in Sevenoaks. He had proved remarkably (to her, touchingly) sensitive about their temporary absence. Losing two front teeth, even two false front teeth, at the age of fifty, even if only for a week, had distressed him: he had sat opposite her at the breakfast table with a napkin over his mouth, and she knew that it had taken some courage to go to the board meeting at all. No, Charles certainly did object to Ivan’s insults, and Ivan’s divination of Charles’s weak spots was uncannily accurate.

She, for her part, was of the opinion that she did not object to Ivan’s insults at all. She saw them as emanations of his own tormented, neurotic, anally fixated personality, and nothing to do with herself. She was convinced that he was in reality quite fond of them both. Particularly of herself. He was grateful to her for her power of forgiveness, she suspected, for the absolution she continued to extend. Such an ugly, red-faced, no, worse, blue-faced little man. Small, squashed, snub, stout. She had known him for many years. One would have thought that the principle of people living in glasshouses not throwing stones would have warned Ivan off a career as a journalist, gossip, and so-called satirist, but it did not seem to occur to him that he was asking for trouble of a kind that she knew would cause him the most intimate anguish: but in fact, so appalling were Ivan’s features and physique that comment on them was rare, even his worst enemies (and he had hundreds) not considering them fair game. Comment on his dreadful behaviour, by contrast, flourished. Maybe, she idly wondered, as she drew a red biro daisy by the Metropole Hotel, maybe he chooses to be so offensive verbally in order to divert attention from his appearance? An interesting conjecture. Though Ivan claimed success with women, despite or because of his natural handicaps, and Liz herself, though she had not slept with him, had on one occasion in the early years of her marriage to Charles found herself, to her own surprise, sitting on a table in a flat in Belsize Park Gardens with Ivan’s hand inside her bra. She could remember the incident quite clearly, although the circumstances surrounding it had vanished into oblivion, beyond recall of any form of analysis: it had been early afternoon, so clearly not a party incident – maybe they had had lunch together? – and she had been anxious about picking up children from school. She kept telling Ivan that she had to leave, and he kept telling her that he was a great lover although his prick was only six inches long. Or something to that effect. And all the time his hand had been inside her bra. She could remember the bra, it had been rather a good black lace wired Kayser Bondor, of a line that appeared to have been discontinued, as she’d never been able to find another. But why had they been sitting on a table? And in whose flat? These were mysteries now known only to God.

She had not slept with Ivan, nor ever would, but was deriving a secret satisfaction from the knowledge that present at her party that night would be all the men with whom she had ever slept: or all save one, and he had been from another country, and she had not known his name. There were not so many of them: five, to be precise, and one of those was Charles, and another her first husband Edgar Lintot, to whom she had remained married for less than a year. Of the other three, one had been revenge, one an escapade, and one half serious, but all had now merged into a sentimental distance, an affectionate presence. She had set much store by retaining or restoring her relations with these men, and thought she knew why. After the sickening shock of the rapid deterioration of her first childish marriage, she had been so afraid of ever again being engulfed by hatred and violence that she had maintained a resolute pleasantness even through the worst of times, even with Charles, who was not an easy man. She had called it maturity, this pleasantness. She was determined never again to be a party to the hideous transformation which overcomes the partners of a bad marriage, who grow fangs and horns and sprout black monstrous wolfish hair, who claw and cling and bite and suck. There would be no more of that: she would see the person as he was, and see him steadily, setting aside her own long shadow as it fell. Her success in this enterprise had fortified her in her career as psychotherapist, had given her confidence in her right to pursue it, in the rightness of her pursuing it. Even her first husband she had regained from that dreadful hinterland of marsh and bog and storm cloud: and now they were good friends, she and Edgar, in the sunlight, harmlessly friends, and on some subjects (the National Health Service, the pathology of multiple murderers, the ethics of reporting violent crime) had struck up alliances that excluded, that increasingly and dramatically excluded, her husband Charles.

So there they would be, all friends together. Edgar, Roy, Charles, Philip and Jules. A pity about that Dutchman: their union had taken place in a narrow cabin on the North Sea, crossing from The Hague to Harwich in a Force Nine gale, and they had omitted to exchange names and addresses. Would he have enjoyed her party? Would he have raised a knowing glass? They had rolled around in the narrow berth on the unanchored sheet, slipping on the shiny much-worn cheap leatherette surface of the bunk, lurching in and out of one another in a determined kind of way, the only passengers on the boat not to be paralysed with seasickness. The selection of the fittest. The crossing had lasted eighteen hours instead of eight. An epic. Did he remember, where was he, who was he? Too late to recall him now, he was one ghost who could not obey her summons.

Edgar, Roy, Charles, Philip and Jules. She had finished with them all. Maybe she had finished with sexual intercourse for ever, maybe it was this possibility that gave her this peculiar conviction of strength, this sense of invulnerability, of certainty, of power. They would attack her no more, weaken her no more. She had closed the gates. This was not orthodox, but then, although a Freudian, she was not an orthodox Freudian, and her vision of futurity did not exclude celibacy. From within herself, she would survey. An observer, a non-combatant. As a child, reading her mother’s collection of Victorian novels, Edwardian novels, she had wondered how women could bear to renounce their position in the centre of the matrimonial stage, the sexual arena, how they could bring themselves to consent to adopt the role of chaperon, to sit at the edge of the dance on little gilt-legged chairs gossiping and watching, spectators, as the younger ones innocently paired, as the older ones not so innocently paired, in the ever-changing formations of the floor. How could one bear to be on the sidelines? Not to be invited to the waltz? Not ever again to be invited to the waltz? But now she could see the charm, could read the meaning, of the observer’s role, a meaning inaccessible to a sixteen-year-old, to a thirty-year-old – for the observer was not, as she had from the vantage, the disadvantage of childhood supposed, charged with an envious and impotent malice, and consumed with a fear of imminent death: no, the observer was filled and informed with a quick and lively and long-established interest in all those that passed before, in all those that moved and circled and wheeled around, was filled with intimate connections and loving memories and hopes and concerns and prospects. Nor was the observer impotent, for it was through the potency of the observer that these children took their being and took the floor. Actual children, children of the heart and the imagination, old friends, new friends, the children of friends, they circle, they weave, and the pattern is both one’s own and not one’s own, it is of the making of generations. One is no longer the hopeful or the despairing guest: one is host in the house of oneself.

So thought Liz Headleand, as she sat at her dressing-table, in her yellow-walled, her yellow marble-veined dressing-room, eating nuts. She put her glasses on to peer once more at the vanished smear of mascara, and was amused to see the print of her face leap into sharp relief: a new trick, for her glasses are quite new. She dabbed again with the tissue. Her glasses amused her. So did the amusing little sag of her incipient double chin, the veining on her cheeks (which, unlike Alix, she does not think to cover with Liquid Foundation), the slight plump soft dimpling of her upper arm, the raised veins in the backs of her hands, the broadening of her hips, the decreasing flexibility of her joints. These signs of age, of the ageing process, she greeted and greets with curiosity, with a resolute welcome. One might as well welcome them, after all: there is not much point in rejecting them. It is all intended, it is all part of the plan. There is a goal to this journey, there will be an arrival, Liz Headleand believes. It is only by refusing to move onwards that we truly die. She truly believes this. She has good reason to believe it.

Her mother sits in Northam, listening to what?

Liz stands up, regards herself, inspects her hemline, adjusts the safety pin fastening her gold leather belt, admires her gold sandals, pats her silver locket, and smooths the limp, cross-cut, loose-woven cream Moroccan cotton over her broadening hips. She looks upon her broadening hips as an affirmation of life. (Her mother is a scraggy old thing, starved and skinny.) She pulls in her stomach, smartly, as she will remember to do, episodically, throughout the evening, when not too deeply engaged in other pursuits.

Now Charles, he is a different case, she acknowledges. For him, weight is no longer perhaps a laughing matter. He ought to take more care. He is getting solid, even fat, and that reddish tinge to his face has become permanent rather than intermittent. Too many lunches, too many dinners, too many glasses of port at the club beam betrayal from Charles’s complexion, bulge from his shirt front. His hair is receding, too. She wonders where he is. She has not seen him since half past six, when they met in the kitchen over a salami sandwich. He was preoccupied, and spoke of trouble with the Home Office and a documentary on prison conditions. The fatter and balder Charles becomes, the more formidable he looks. She supposes that this is only natural. He is probably downstairs, knocking back a stiff gin and tonic before submitting himself to the milder offering of champagne.

20.35 says the little red clock. She has lost five minutes, somewhere. It is time to go downstairs, to see how Deirdre is getting on in the kitchen, to make sure the butlers are not drinking too much.

So down the wide staircase she goes, past the oak chest with its bowl of white roses on the half-landing, past the Albers squares, past the dim varnished portrait of a full-bosomed crimson-gowned pearl-decked eighteenth-century woman who some take to be an ancestor, though she had in fact come with the house, down through the black and white tiled hall with its marble and gilt claw-legged table strewn with Christmas cards, gloves, and glossy free advertising magazines, and into the broad high first-floor drawing-room, where sat Charles, drinking a gin and tonic, which she had expected, and talking to Esther and Alix, which she had not.

Three floors up, on the top floor of the large house, Sally Headleand sat on her bedroom floor painting her toe-nails a pale silvery green and listening to her stepbrother Alan trying to explain about inflation and unemployment and monetarism and the economic implications of the new rhetoric praising the Victorian values of family life. In the background, Tom Robinson on a new Christmas cassette sang ‘The Winter of Seventy-Nine’. Sally liked listening to Alan, though she understood only one word in a hundred. He was loyal to the old Left, was Alan, unlike their turncoat father who had in recent years been wooed by, and had, it seemed, espoused, the radical Right. The unions had driven him to infidelity. Alan reassured her. Her father upset her. Her mother said it was stimulating to be upset, and maybe it was, but that didn’t prevent her from preferring the solace of the old wisdom. It had surrounded her at her progressive private school, it surrounded her still at her fashionable newish university, but she herself lacked economic grasp and was uncomfortably aware of having lost, of late, a few arguments with outsiders, of having been thrown back on arguments about personalities. She was too intelligent to enjoy this position, and too much of a feminist not to be made uncomfortable by its sexist implications. So it comforted her to see Alan lying there on her bed, his huge ancient unpolished cracked shoes nestling comfortably in the tangled mess of her grey sheets and leaking duvet and discarded purple socks, his eager owl face shining with enlightenment as he spoke abstractly of public spending projects and the American New Deal and tight fiscal policy. One could never tell when or whether Alan was wholly serious, for he found ideas exciting in themselves, too exciting, perhaps, ever to be put into practice: there he lay, smoking, waving, occasionally running his fingers through his thick black curly hair, and dropping cigarette ash through the slit into an old Coca-Cola tin. He spoke of the state as mother, of the history of those who clung to the state as mother, of the psychology of those who wished to orphan themselves from the mother, of the novel oddity of a woman prime minister who was in fact a mother but was not nevertheless thereby motherly. Sally listened, entranced. She didn’t see enough of Alan, now he had moved to Manchester. She needed a regular fix from Alan, to reassure her that the world was still familiar, manageable, subject to known laws.

Alan himself had never known his mother. His mother had died in a car crash when he was three months old. He, with his two elder brothers, had been brought up by a nanny, until, three years later, his father married Liz. Liz had taken on Alan and his brothers. The three boys had always assumed, as soon as they reached the age for such assumptions, that Charles had married Liz in order to provide the three motherless babes with a proper family life. Sally, of course, had never assumed anything of the sort.

It was shortly after Sally’s birth, in 1960, that Charles had purchased this large house. It had seemed, at the time, a daring gesture. Forty thousand pounds he had paid for it, a sum which now seemed laughably small, but which in those days had been a vast amount to pay for a private house, even in such a prime position. It had been financed by blood money, blood money from the wealthy parents of Charles’s dead wife. Liz had been keen on the transaction. The house had been in an appalling condition, full of junk and rubbish, its elegant lines unreadable through years of accretions and demolitions. It had been used for many years as a staff hostel for an Oxford Street department store. Five floors, and broad, with an eighteenth-century spaciousness. A challenge. They needed a large house, with four children already, possibly more to come, with a housekeeper and an au pair girl: impossible to survive much longer in their cramped, narrow, bijou terrace in Fulham. From Fulham to Harley Street was an extravagant removal, not the kind of move that young professional couples made, in those days, but the Headleands, ambitious, imaginative, self-appointed pioneers of they knew not what, had done it, and with aplomb. The house, in 1980, would be worth, their friends enviously muttered, perhaps a million, perhaps more. True, the rates had soared, but so had the Headleands’ incomes. It now lodged not only what was left of the Headleand family, but also the private part of Liz’s practice, and the practices of two of her colleagues: a shared secretary had taken over what had once been the au pair girl’s flat. A going concern, a successful enterprise.

Liz loved the house, she loved the neighbourhood. It gave her great delight, to see her children and Charles’s, here, thus, in the centre. Her own childhood had been lived on the margins: she had wanted theirs to be calm, to be spared the indignities of fighting unnecessary territorial and social wars. They would have greater freedom thus, she argued. Charles shared this faith. His own childhood, though markedly less strenuous, less arduous than Liz’s, had not been without its privations, its humiliations. He liked the centre as much as Liz herself.

Liz still, after all these years, found satisfaction in giving her address. Each time a shop assistant or a clerk or a tradesman wrote down Dr E. Headleand, Harley Street, the same thrill of self-affirmation, of self-definition would be re-enacted. Liz Ablewhite of Abercorn Avenue had become Liz Headleand of Harley Street, London W1. Nobody could argue with that, nobody could question it, it was so. Her largest dreams, her most foolish fantasies, had been enacted in bricks and mortar and mantelshelves and tiled floors and plaster ceilings. It seemed improbable, but it was so. The Headleands of Harley Street. Resonant, exemplary. A myriad uncertainties and hesitations were buried beneath that solid pile, banished by the invocation of a street name. Vanished suburbia, vanished the provinces, vanished forever solitude and insignificance and social fear. No wonder that she and Charles felt that they led a charmed life, that the times were on their side.

It was not fairy gold that had fallen into their open laps: the first Mrs Headleand, it was true, had conveniently died, but Charles and Liz thereafter had worked for their position. They had studied long hours, both of them, they had burned the midnight oil while munching their way through textbooks and qualifications, through overtime and late-night meetings. They had taken professional risks, had survived personal disasters. And now they inhabited their house.

It had taken some labour to restore: a gang of builders had spent months ripping down hardboard partitions, taking out gas meters, attempting to rescue old parquet flooring, refitting windows, stripping paint from tiles. The most unpleasant discoveries were made during the process of clearance: cupboards full of urine-encrusted chamber pots, of ancient patent medicine, of dead mice, of moth-infested garments, of fossilized scraps of nineteenth-century food: Hogarthian, Dickensian relics of an oppressed and squalid past. In one room there was a plastic sack full of used sanitary towels. Liz had joked that they were sure, in the rafters, to discover 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 world of suits and ties and speeches, of meetings and money. 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 this respect. Brian came from her own home town, though she had not known him there: this had some 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 in the department we are visiting on the problems of adoption and stepparents. . . .’ And on she prattled, watching with some satisfaction 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 tuneless, there were cries and embraces. Two hundred people, solitude and self dispelled. Liz, at the magic moment, found herself unexpectedly clutching the hot hand of Ivan Warner, which seemed wrong but ordained: she looked for Charles, and saw that the poor man had managed to find himself in the icy palm of Lady Henrietta. Such were the random dispositions of fate. But Alix and Brian had found one another, and so had Otto and Caroline Werner: Esther was caught between lofty Edgar and little Pett Petrie, herself the smallest of all. Should old acquaintance be forgot, they sang, bravely, recklessly, tunelessly, and as the singing stopped, Ivan kissed Liz’s hand. ‘Liz,’ he said, ‘Liz, I’ve always admired your style, but this was something else.’

She took it, for the moment, as a tribute, beneath the chandelier.

Beneath the chandelier. From it fell refracted light, on balding heads and shaven heads, on Mohican plumes and gelled spikes, on neatly barbered and dressed locks, on neglected middle-aged wispy bobs, on plaits and loops and layered body waves. The plural, the eclectic seventies. Dark suits, pale blue shirts, Indian kurtahs worn not exclusively by Indians, Viyella shirts, striped mother-knitted pullovers, designer-monogrammed pullovers, cheap ethnic dresses, expensive ethnic dresses, long skirts, short skirts, exclusive French dresses, hand-stitched English dresses, Oxfam thirties dresses, prim high mandarin collars, plunging necklines, slit skirts, glimpses of suspender belts, clown pantaloons, dungarees, studded belts, limp leather belts, crackling metal belts, belts slung round waists, hips, bellies. Disparate, disparate, a hundred opinions, a hundred cross currents, in this blond Georgian drawing-room: ancestral echoes of ancient Victorian philanthropy of the Clapham school mingled with louche ghosts of Bloomsbury, public-school public servants held hands with hybrid tieless entrepreneurs of the television aristocracy, new modes of moneyed brutality addressed old shrinking brutality, the educated sons (well, let us not exaggerate, one educated son) of one skilled manual worker maintained an exchange with one exhausted feudal Northumbrian homosexual neurosurgeon, and the accents of North London raised themselves melodiously, classlessly, incomprehensibly, from the throats of the variously reared young, from the singing birds of the future, in their indeterminate, as yet unidentifiable plumage. There they gathered, the employee who lacks employment, the faithless priest, the investor about to hang himself in the expectation of plenty, the physician who will not be able to heal herself, the director who lacks all direction, the historian who denies the existence of history, the Jewish scholar of early Renaissance Christian iconography, the deaf man who hears voices, the woman about to be taken in adultery. A mingling, of a sort, in this exclusive, this eclectic room, this room full of riddles.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sally to Alan ten minutes after midnight in the kitchen, amidst the empty bottles and the crumpled napkins. ‘How could they? I don’t believe it.’

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Alan, and bravely, coolly drank a glass of water from the tap. ‘I’ve never known what they were up to. And anyway, it’s nothing to do with us. Not now.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’

But panic filled Sally’s twenty-year-old heart, for it was, she thought, something to do with her. Now, and always.

Aaron sat on the roof and stared at the sky. Five floors up. The London skyline, the Post Office Tower, the sounds of distant merriment. He lit a cigarette. He had seen what he should not have seen. He was sitting, moreover, where he had often been told not to sit. As children, they had not been allowed on the roof. And were not now. Aaron brooded. He had been in the habit of brooding, up here, as a child. It had frightened Liz. Understandably. He remembered when she once had to beg him to come down. He could see her now, in the room below, under the skylight, gazing up. Imploring. Sweetie, come down, she had begged ridiculously. He had felt power in his distress. He had backed away, had stood perilously on the parapet. Her face had been distorted, ugly, foreshortened, all teeth and mouth. He had been frightened of himself, of her, of the height, of the sky, of the necessity of daring.

He had brooded over his dead mother. Jonathan and Alan never mentioned her. He had meditated upon her, up here. He could not remember her, of course.

The London streets stretched away. As a small child, he had been taken to see Peter Pan. The old-fashioned backdrop painted with its winking windows had been remarkably similar to this view, his view. He had thought he could fly, if he willed it enough.

Sweet Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off.

And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.

‘Sweetie, please come down. Come down and we’ll all have supper. It’s on the table. It’s going cold. Come down, sweetie.’

Poor Liz. He had teased her. The others would not: they were good, compliant. Somebody had to tease, to sit on dangerous edges, to affect melancholia.

The dark night surrounded him. He had seen what he should not have seen. But would not speak. Therefore, having played the piano for the people, he sat in the dark.

In the early hours, in the first hours of 1980, gossip spread. Some did not want to listen. Alix, who had no idea of what the gossip was to be about, but who could sense its ominous crackling in the distance, wanted to go home, but tiresomely Brian, the party-hater, had managed to find his old friend Otto Werner and was deep in conversation about English social class, European intellectuals, the German education system, public schools, and the appointing of JPs and magistrates, a rich vein which they might have been able to explore for another hour at least, had Alix not been at their elbow, murmuring of departure. In other circumstances she would have been more than willing to engage in this conversation herself, for it was one she had frequently enjoyed; she liked Otto, she had always mildly fancied that he liked her, she was amused by the offhand continental gallantries with which he interspersed, absent-mindedly, the rigour of his argument; but tonight she was tired, her eyes were closing, she had had four hours of party already, had not enjoyed the Hargreaves drama, had not enjoyed her talks with Ivan Warner and Teddy Lazenby, had been polite enough for long enough, and wanted to go home; so stood at Brian’s elbow, dully, a reproachful wife, slightly annoyed that neither of them took much notice of her, as Otto invoked the name of Max Weber, a name which meant nothing to her at all, a name which excluded her, exhausted her, and provoked her into prodding, yet again, but this time successfully, Brian’s arm, and murmuring of babysitter Sharon, who was only sixteen.

Esther also left not long after midnight. Esther knew what she knew, had seen what she had seen, but like Aaron chose to say nothing. She rather thought that Charles knew what she knew, and it was this suspicion that prompted what was, for her, an early departure. She had planned to walk home, but accepted, on the front steps, an offer of a lift from Teddy Lazenby and his wife Delia, who lived in Campden Square and could easily drop her off. Esther had not seen either of them since her days at Cambridge, and listened with a connoisseur’s ear to Delia’s laments about time passing, times changing, the difficulties of keeping in touch. Esther, who had always been deeply bored with Delia and had no wish whatsoever to keep in touch with her, sat quietly in the smooth, upholstered, comfortable, large toffee-brown Volvo, which smelled of dog. She said nothing, except to give directions. She got home quickly, smoothly, easily, said good night politely, and went in and firmly shut the door.

In their wake, the party in Harley Street continued and rumours thickened. Looking back, Liz would try to remember the moment at which she had known rather than not known: she would have liked to have thought that she had known always, that there was no moment of shock, that knowledge had lain within her (the all-knowing), that she had never truly been deceived, that at the very worst she had connived at her own deceit. Surely Ivan’s first sentence of the New Year had alerted her? (Though that would have been late, late, late.) Surely she had taken it as an ill omen? But no, she had taken it at its face value: from Ivan, of all people, who spread malice as his trade. She had thought herself exempt. Slow she had been, unbearably slow, she who could hear many strands of speech at once: trusting she had been, she who had been reared in the bosom of suspicion. She had thought herself invulnerable. She had been possessed by pride.

Hints, glances, sliding words, oblique smiles, incomprehensible references. Why had she not received them earlier? Had she been too preoccupied with butlers, with introductions, with orchestration, with champagne? Or had the guests waited until midnight, the witching hour, before turning into swine? Pig-faced, snub-nosed, bristling broad-jowled Ivan, snouting disaster. That ominous expression of sympathy from pebbled-glassed Jules, who took her hand and asked her meaningfully how she was? Esther’s strange allusion to a hornet’s nest? That look of frank dislike and satisfaction from Antonia Haycock? That uncharacteristically and overly broad anecdote from Pett Petrie? Hilda Stark’s excessively theatrical departing conspiratorial embrace? That odd, bitter, comradely crack about men from Kate Armstrong? That glance of panic from her daughter Sally? All these messages had been sent forth, and she had received none of them, had continued to consider herself in charge, in control, the prime mover. Until, under the mirror, after many a circle and feint, after many a playful retreat and renewed approach, Ivan at last cornered her, and even before he opened his mouth she felt the smell of fear from herself: her pores broke open, she stood there panting slightly, her hair rising on the back of her neck in terror, her heated skin covered in icy sweat: ‘And when,’ asked Ivan pleasantly, ‘are you two going to make the announcement? Is it to be tonight, or do we wait?’

The words meant nothing, or should have meant nothing. She smiled foolishly. Her mind leaped. It ran, it leaped, it scrambled for cover. It turned.

‘And why not tonight?’ she said.

‘You’ve kept your own plans very dark,’ said Ivan.

‘Ah well, you know me,’ she said, knowing nothing.

‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ said Ivan. ‘I think you two stuck it out pretty well, in the circumstances. How long has it been? Twenty years?’

The utterly expected, the utterly unexpected, can they be the same thing, she wondered.

‘Your name,’ Ivan continued, ‘has been linked with Gabriel Denham’s, but I don’t even see him here tonight.’

She stood there: he stared at her. She could say nothing. A pillar of salt. She was dependent on him. She could not move until he released her.

‘Whereas Henrietta, I see,’ Ivan continued with a remorseless pity, ‘is very much at home here.’

‘Henrietta?’ Liz echoed. It was the moment she was most to regret. It betrayed ignorance. Only a second’s ignorance, but ignorance. Had Ivan noticed? Desperate, she found again the faculty of speech, heard her own voice, familiar, natural, even powerful: ‘Ah yes, Henrietta. Yes, we see a good deal of Henrietta.’ She had no notion of what her words meant, but they sounded good, they fortified her, and she continued bravely, ‘But as for Gabriel, whose name has not been linked with Gabriel’s? I think you must find a more interesting candidate than Gabriel. What about, for example – ’ and she cast her eyes around her assembly, seeing reprieve, in the approaching form of Edgar Lintot, her first husband, ‘what about Edgar? Now that would be an interesting plot, for us at least. I see a great deal of Edgar these days, you know. We often lunch together. Well,’ (and the plausibility of her own tone, at the moment, amazed her) ‘sometimes.’

‘What’s all this?’ said tall, beaky, dedicated Edgar. ‘Gossip, is it? I’ve come to say good night, Lizzie. I’ve got a long drive tomorrow. Very nice party, very nice. See you at the meeting.’

‘Yes, gossip,’ said Ivan tenaciously. ‘We were talking about Charles and Henrietta. I wonder what New York will make of Henrietta.’

Edgar was not listening. Ivan did not interest him, gossip did not interest him, he had given up the personal life. He kissed Liz on the cheek. ‘I think it’s on the thirtieth, isn’t it? Have a good time with the Japanese tomorrow. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘Give my love to your mother,’ said Liz. She managed to edge herself out of her corner, away from Ivan, back into the current. She followed Edgar a few paces across the room. Ivan, behind her, was accosted by a fellow-journalist. He wanted to retain her, to keep her, to tease her, to worry her, to kill her, but he could not: she escaped. Escaped to a comforting, numbing succession of thanks and farewells, for the party was beginning to break up: ‘Happy New Year,’ echoed again and again, as Liz searched vaguely for Charles but could not find him, Happy New Year, see you soon, goodbye, say goodbye to Charles for me, goodbye. And there, in a conspicuous lull, was Lady Henrietta herself, extending her hand and cheek. Seeing her, Liz saw it all. The certainty inspired her. She drew breath.

‘And when,’ she asked politely, ‘do you go to New York?’

Henrietta looked back, with a frigid calm, beneath which lay a hesitation.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yes. I thought February.’

‘Yes,’ said Liz.

‘Perhaps we could talk some rime? . . . May I ring you? We could have lunch?’

‘Yes,’ said Liz. She had won, temporarily: she had managed to give the impression that she knew. Though what it was that she knew, she could not at that moment have said.

The two women kissed, again, and drew apart.

It was to be a long night. The hard core of party-goers stayed on until the small hours, drinking coffee, sprawled on settees, sinking into morose abuse and gloom, surfacing occasionally to laugh, to chatter, relapsing, rising, sinking again. Joseph O’Toole (always among the last to leave any party) sat in a corner with Anthony Keating talking of God. Kate Armstrong came in with another tray of coffee. The young people had gone upstairs, to bed, or not to bed: strains of music drifted from the upper regions plaintively. Charles reappeared, after half an hour’s absence, and threw himself into an armchair, where he lay back for some time with his eyes shut. Liz thought he looked appalling, and wondered why she hadn’t noticed it before. Blotchy, middle aged, fat. She was frightened of him. She had always been frightened of him. That was why she had fallen in love with him. He had power over her. And now he was going to divorce her and marry Lady Henrietta Latchett. She knew it all, now: she had divined it all. Too late for self-respect, but not too late to exact a little vengeance. No wonder he looked so crumpled. He was about to embark on a new life in New York with the most boring woman in Britain. And she, at her age, what was she to do? A terrible, drunken tiredness filled her and she too sat back and shut her eyes. The room turned, as it had done in the parties of her youth.

The sight of both host and hostess apparently sleeping rallied the laggards, eventually, and with apologies they began to stumble to their feet. Liz and Charles rose too. Little was said: it was too late. Only one interchange could Liz later remember: ‘A very good party, a better party than ever,’ said the recently felled historian Giles, now fully recovered, to which Liz heard herself reply, ‘Well, it’s as well you made the most of it, for it will be the last.’

The announcement was greeted with mute and grave acceptance by the departing guests. Cold air drifted in through the front door. Liz shivered. The door shut. She and Charles returned to the drawing-room. They sat down. Ceremonially, as it were: to attention, as it were.

‘I’m going to bed,’ said Charles, but did not move.

Liz stared at him. She could see that he was frightened of her. He looked lamentable, disadvantaged, weak. His eyes were bloodshot.

‘You didn’t dare to tell me,’ said Liz.

‘I think we should get divorced,’ said Charles.

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Did you think I’d try to stop you? Did you think I’d plead with you to stay?’

‘No,’ said Charles, dully. ‘It wasn’t that. Not that at all. Anyway, I thought you knew.’

‘If you thought I knew, why didn’t you tell me?’

He laughed briefly.

‘This was a very expensive charade,’ she said, pursuing her advantage. She was beginning to think she knew where she was. He nodded agreement, muttered that he thought a grand finale would be her kind of thing, better to wrap it up in style, he said, echoing Ivan. And then he suddenly said, in a more natural tone, in an everyday tone that she rarely heard from him these days, ‘And anyway, I thought it wouldn’t matter to anyone, now the children are grown up.’

‘What?’

Patiently, he repeated, as though perhaps she had not heard: ‘I thought it wouldn’t matter to anyone, now the children are grown up.’

‘What on earth has it got to do with the children?’

‘Oh well. You know. One wouldn’t have wanted to split up the family.’

This banal observation astounded her, though she did not know why. It seemed to come from another world of reference, an older, ordinary world, of platitude and cliché, of pattern and familiar family ties, a world that she had thought they had never entered, for many good reasons never entered: and now here was Charles himself, invoking its terms, as though it had been there always, as though they had always inhabited its domain.

‘Do you mean to say,’ she ventured, disliking the silence, ‘that in your view we’ve only stuck it out together all these years because of the children? Because of the so-called children?’

Charles shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I thought. I thought that was what you thought. I knew you’d rather have been off on your own, if it hadn’t been for the children. You’ve been very good with the children, I wouldn’t deny that. But I knew you were getting restless. Wanting to be off.’

‘Whatever made you think that?’

‘You.’

‘Me?’

‘You.’

‘I made you think that?’

‘Yes, you,’ he said, patiently, irritably, still with that relentlessly everyday, normative tone, as though this whole discussion were the most ordinary event, the most expected of interchanges. ‘You’re not going to start pretending you want to move to New York, are you? You’ve always made it quite clear that you were staying here and that I could fuck off to the other end of the world for all you cared. You’re too busy to speak some days. You won’t even notice I’ve gone.’

He spoke without embarrassment.

‘That’s not quite fair,’ she said cautiously. ‘It’s not as though you’re not quite busy yourself. You haven’t had much time for domestic life of late, have you? Or ever. Come to that.’

‘We’re not a domestic couple. Though I must say, you did a good job with the boys. Considering the problems.’

The elegiac note sounded ominously, unanswerably, offering calm and collusion: as if aware of the risks, Charles struck suddenly out, moving out into dangerous white water, tipping over the edge into a new reach.

‘And anyway,’ said Charles, ‘then there was Henrietta.’

‘Ah,’ said Liz, feeling herself begin to glitter and crackle and spark, striking out herself, away from sadness and regret, ‘yes, of course, that’s a point. There was Henrietta. When was there Henrietta? When? Tell me when? How long has all this been going on, behind my back?’

A new reach, but the words were banal here too: how could she be uttering them?

‘I’m not telling you,’ he said, in a manner that later she condemned as sheepish.

‘When? This month? This year? Last year? Go on, don’t just sit there, tell me,’ she demanded, in a manner that later she condemned as shrewish.

He covered his eyes with his hand and moaned. ‘For God’s sake, sweetie. Let’s leave it till morning, shall we? I’m knackered. Let’s leave it till morning.’

But she heard herself saying, still in shrewish style, that on the contrary there wasn’t any time in the morning, that she had to go to a psychoanalytical conference in the Metropole Hotel with a bunch of Japanese in the morning, that she wanted to talk now, that he couldn’t just announce that he wanted to get divorced and then decide he was too tired to talk about it. On and on she heard herself ranting (could it be that she heard echoes of her own past self, the speaking, ranting, resurrected ghost of that ephemeral figure Liz Lintot?) and heard his vague, evasive grunts and answers: yes, he said, he and Henrietta would marry as soon as possible, Henrietta wanted to go to New York with him, she’d had a thin time herself lately, he needed her in New York, Henrietta hadn’t been well, needed to settle . . . and as Liz spoke and listened she was aware of a simultaneous conviction that this was the most shocking, the most painful hour of her entire life, and also that it was profoundly dull, profoundly trivial, profoundly irrelevant, a mere routine, devoid of truth, devoid of meaning: nothing.

‘Honestly,’ Charles was saying, after more than an hour of beleaguered explanation, or semi-explanation, ‘I didn’t think you’d take it like this, old thing, I thought you’d – well, I thought you’d be relieved, to tell you the truth. Relieved to be rid of me. You know me. Worthless kind of chap, in my own way. What did you expect? Good of you to put up with me so long. You’ll have more scope on your own.’

‘You lying hypocrite,’ said Liz, exhausted, without rancour. ‘You feeble, contemptible, cowardly two-faced cheat.’

‘There, there,’ said Charles.

‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she heard herself say.

‘Why not?’ said Charles, with admirable, with deadly equanimity. ‘I’ve always forgiven you.’

‘Ah yes,’ she heard herself cry, ‘but then I never went away, did I? I stayed, I stayed with you. I never went away!’ And suddenly, astonishingly, astonished, she began to weep, great sobs bursting out of her, tears leaping from her eyes, a kind of howling noise in her nose and throat, and Charles got up and came and sat by her and took her in his arms as she howled like a six-year-old. ‘There, there,’ he kept saying, until she lay calm against his shoulder, calm and sodden: ‘Come to bed,’ he said, and pulled her to her feet, and supported her up the stairs, past the paintings and the roses, and into her bedroom, where she lay motionless as he began to take off her sandals, her tights, her dress. He found her new white Christmas-present nightdress hanging on the back of the dressing room door, and heaved her into it, then opened the bed, and pushed her between the sheets. He found a sleeping pill, a glass of water, and put them on the table by her side. Then he undressed and lay down beside her and took her in his arms. They had not slept in the same bed for nearly two years. ‘There, there,’ he said, soothingly, ‘hold on to me, hold on.’ She held on to him, because he was there, because he had been there. He was very solid. She held on to twenty years of him. Heavy, solid, smooth, adult. Safe. The man who had never been safe became, upon leaving her, safe to her. So it was. The death of danger. No harm to come, no more harm to come. Calm shore. He rocked her in his arms. They slept.

London nights. Aaron lay awake at the top of the house. He had overseen, foreseen, overheard. The night was still. The party was over. London, West One. He made himself levitate over the capital. Dark street. Would they have switched off the cold fountains in Trafalgar Square? The owls hooted in Highgate, in Wimbledon, in Dulwich. Drinking men lay huddled in newspaper on benches, on railways stations, beneath the arches, beneath the Festival Hall. Aaron listened to the silence, and to the faint music of a cassette: the fifth symphony of Sibelius. Where the swan drifts upon the darkening flood. He communed with his mother, he implored her to drift with him. Was she there, was it she that was with him? Two floors below, his stepmother lay in his father’s arms, for the last time. Sweet Hamlet, cast this nighted colour off. The party was over. Where would he drift now? The soft cool currents of the air lifted him above the sleeping city, swirled him gently. The music gathered its strength. He lay in its arms. It was the first morning of 1980.