Читать книгу The Radiant Way - Margaret Drabble - Страница 6

Meanwhile, up in Northam, that figurative Northern city, the New Year had also advanced, ignored by some, welcomed by others, bringing surprises to some, and a deadly, continuing tedium to others. The Other Nation, less than two hundred miles away, celebrated in its own style. In a renovated Georgian terrace house less than a quarter of a mile from the Civic Centre, actors, actresses, arts officers, leisure officers, artists-in-residence, playwright-in-residence, and a visiting jazz musician gathered together to laugh, to sing, to eat spinach salad and green bean salad and mackerel pâté and wholemeal bread and curried brown rice: they played games, word games, charades, quotation games. Northam’s poet sat glumly in a corner with a plateful and a pint and watched with silent outrage, as was his way. Next door, an old woman in her seventies read aloud to her ninety-two-year-old mother, as she had read aloud of an evening for decades; their house had not been renovated, it belonged to another age. Solid provincial comfort, a little shabby now, but solid. They had stuck it out, as the area stormed around them: they had stood their ground, resisting all offers of rehousing, uprooting. They would die in their own beds. Their high-smelling dog lay on the hairy ancient rug before the smokeless fuel fire. Round the corner another old woman in her seventies awaited the departure of the year, huddled in bed for warmth, clad in layer upon layer of old nylon nightdress, woolly cardigan, matted flannel dressing-gown, gazing at an unsatisfactory black and white television flickering at her from a chair by the bed. She could see nothing, could make out nothing, but it was a comfort, it was company, she heard its voices, they spoke to her. In the flat below, a teenage couple quarrelled about whether it was safe to leave the baby and go down to the pub. The baby cried, as babies do. The more it cried, the more they wanted to leave it, and the less safe it seemed to leave it. The girl began to cry, as girls do, and the teenage father went out on his own, slamming the door behind him. The girl shouted abuse after him, then picked up her baby for comfort, and settled down to watch telly with the remains of a bag of cheese and onion crisps.

Further out, in the fashionable village-suburb of Breasbrough, civic spirits were high at a New Year’s Eve party, where left-wing councillors, left-wing teachers, left-wing journalists, left-wing social workers and a few agnostic entrepreneurs raised their glasses and looked forward to the exhilarating confrontation of the approaching steel strike: they were high on a recent freak by-election in the neighbourhood which had reversed the national trend to the Right and given, in their own view, a renewed popular blessing to their defiant, daring programme of high social expenditure. Socialism begins at home, they told one another as they filled their glasses with Oake and Nephews’ Special Christmas Offer Beaujolais. Northam’s elderly historian and honorary ideologue sat glumly in a corner with a plateful and a pint, and watched with silent outrage, as was his way. He did not trust this new wave of optimism. He had seen too many waves fall harmlessly upon the shore. He did not approve of wine drinking. He was going deaf: on purpose, he sometimes thought.

Half a mile up the hill, spirits were also high in the home of Eddie Duckworth, that plump, much-loved, avuncular manager of Pitts and Harley, newly elected President of the Chamber of Commerce, who had faith that at last a government had been elected that would put a stop to inflation, high interest rates, rocketing domestic and industrial rates, shameful capitulation to the unions, centralized bureaucratic planning, and the consequent decay of the manufacturing industries: the writing is on the wall at the Town Hall, he told his guests, as their glasses were refilled with Oake and Nephews’ Beaujolais. Eddie Duckworth smiled and sparkled and shone. There was much laughter in both Breasbrough houses. There were one or two guests that had been invited to both Breasbrough parties. Northam is a small city, a parochial city. Mrs Eddie Duckworth did not laugh, although she tried to smile. She was not very good at smiling these days, and the unease disseminated by her unconvincing efforts led Eddie Duckworth to mutter to her in a corner, with a mixture of sharpness and sorrow, that perhaps she’d better go to bed. He didn’t know what had come over her, of late.

Shirley Harper, Liz Headleand’s younger sister, was at none of these parties, and had been invited to none. She had been expected to invite people in. This was now, at forty-three, her lot. Though in the old days it had been she who had braved her mother’s disapprobation and slipped out to enjoy herself, while her sister stuck grimly to her books and her duty and her long-term plans. Shirley had been the rebel, the self-willed, the unappeasing. She had lied and deceived, she had painted her lips with toxic red paint from a box of water colours or with the less toxic red dye of rationed Smarties, she had darkened her lashes with shoe polish and perfumed herself with sample offers of cheap perfume solicited through sycophantic correspondence with cosmetic manufacturers. She had visited coffee bars with boys. She had been to the cinema with boys. She had left school against her mother’s wishes, had married against her mother’s wishes.

Yet while Liz, the good daughter, the dutiful daughter, was taking a deep hot bath on New Year’s Eve before changing for her party, Shirley the rebel was serving up a hot meal for her mother in the old house in Abercorn Avenue before rushing back (without appearing to rush) to see what was happening in her own oven at home, where she was cooking a goose for her husband Cliff, his brother Steve and his wife Dora, her own mother- and father-in-law, and Dora’s Uncle Fred. While Liz was nibbling pistachio nuts, surveying dominions, Shirley, hot, red and angry (but not appearing to be angry) was listening yet once more to her mother-in-law’s description of her digestive system and what the doctor had said about the swelling of her legs, a commentary which followed closely upon her complaints about the absence of her two older grandchildren who had (in Shirley’s view very wisely) buggered off to a disco at Maid Marian’s Nitespot. ‘In my day,’ she was saying, ‘New Year’s Eve was a family evening, young people didn’t just suit themselves. We all used to be together on New Year’s Eve, didn’t we, Dad?’

Her husband, thus addressed, did not reply: he rarely did. Since his second stroke he had found the effort of conversation hardly worth the meagre rewards. Whatever he said was always ignored: for years, even when in health, he had been used by his wife as a ventriloquist’s dummy, in support of an endless succession of mutually contradictory banalities, and whenever he had risked an original or even a conciliatory remark he would be firmly rebuffed. So now he sat there, his napkin tucked around his chin, smiling gently: a mild-natured, weak, weakened old man, loyal to his bully of a wife, glad to be included, glad Shirley hadn’t found it all too much for her, grateful to sit there in the warmth of the nice oil-fired 1970s central heating. It made a change. He didn’t get out much.

Steve replied for him. ‘Well, we’re all together still, aren’t we?’ said Cliff’s brother Steve, with some asperity: he could have thought of better ways of spending the evening, given the choice.

‘Apple sauce?’ asked Shirley, who was dishing up, with her back to the table, from a hotplate on a trolley.

‘It all depends what you mean by family,’ said Dora’s Uncle Fred, who tended to pedantry. He looked round, moved his fork cautiously to a different angle on the best embroidered cloth. ‘I’m not family, strictly speaking. Here courtesy of Dora. And of our charming hostess, of course.’

‘Gravy?’ asked Shirley, and poured it on without waiting for an answer. Family. She had lacked family as a child: had missed it. And now she’d got it with a vengeance. The source of murder, battering, violence. However had it happened?

‘Red cabbage?’ asked Shirley.

‘Red cabbage? Red cabbage? I thought it was sprouts. We always have sprouts.’ An angry interjection from the oldest Mrs Harper.

‘It’s sprouts as well,’ said Shirley. ‘I thought I’d do some red cabbage too. As a change.’

‘He won’t like it. He won’t want any. He likes his red cabbage pickled.’ So pursued the oldest Mrs Harper. Her husband smiled and nodded.

‘Yes,’ mused Uncle Fred, ‘families aren’t what they were. It’s all this moving around the country. Thank you, Shirley, that’s grand. By the way, Brian asked me to London again, but I thought I’d wait till the weather’s better.’

‘All what moving about the country?’ asked Cliff, largely to avert further discussion of sprouts and red cabbage, which he could see was imminent from the suspicious manner in which his mother was turning over the vegetables on her heaped plate.

‘Oh, all this moving around for work.’

‘Go on,’ said Steve. ‘No one moves round here. They stick fast, round here. Never been south of Nottingham, half the folks round here.’

‘I think it’s nice for the young folks to get out,’ said Fred. ‘I always encouraged my Brian. I didn’t want to stand in his way.’

Shirley smiled sourly to herself as she poured gravy. Somebody was going to have to ask after Brian soon, ask what he was up to, how he was getting on, but nobody wanted to. They resented Brian. He had got away. They hadn’t even the satisfaction of knowing that he treated his poor old Dad badly, because all things considered, he didn’t. It was probably true that he’d asked him down to London.

‘Is that a clove?’ asked Mrs Harper, triumphant.

‘Yes,’ said Shirley.

‘The cabbage is delicious,’ said Dora, quickly. She and Shirley exchanged glances.

‘And how’s your mother, Shirley?’ asked Mrs Harper, carefully and conspicuously laying her clove on the side of her plate; taking the offensive.

‘She’s much the same as ever,’ said Shirley. ‘Thanks.’

‘Pity she couldn’t be with us,’ said Mrs Harper, dangerously: but Shirley hadn’t the energy to fight back, she helped herself to a spoonful of sage and onion stuffing and sat down to begin her meal. Those served earlier had nearly finished: they didn’t believe in standing on ceremony, in the family. They ate what was in front of them. While it was hot.

‘She doesn’t get out much,’ said Shirley flatly: a statement at once accurate and wonderfully, gloriously misleading: ‘she doesn’t get out much’, an acceptable phrase, a dull little coin, an everyday coin, suggesting a mild, an ordinary, a commonplace disinclination, for in Northam ‘getting out’ was in many circles regarded as suspect, as improper, as leading to no good (those making merry in Breasbrough, for example, were undoubtedly up to no good) – a freak tolerated in the young, though with much grumbling, but considered dissolute, wayward, against nature in their elders. ‘She doesn’t get out much’, a phrase that Shirley had learned to use of her mother to forestall inquiry, impertinence, sympathy: a middle-aged phrase that she heard in her own voice as parody – indeed, she had noticed that when ‘the family’ gathered together all of them spoke in parodies of clichés, and some of them knew quite well that they were doing it. Dora knew, Cliff knew, Fred knew. And everybody there at that table knew that in the case of Shirley Harper’s mother, the phrase ‘she doesn’t get out much’ conveyed the distilled essence of a withdrawal so extreme that the term agoraphobia would hardly do it justice.

‘No, she doesn’t get out much,’ she repeated, almost defiantly, wondering if her sister Liz would bother to ring their mother that night, and if she didn’t, if it mattered. What an extraordinary childhood they had survived. Odd that both of them had turned out almost normal. ‘Her eyesight’s not too good now,’ she continued, as though that might somehow render her mother’s behaviour less odd, as though by mere words she could be converted into a harmless, ordinary, ageing old lady, just like other people’s mothers. And indeed, with old age, Rita Ablewhite was beginning to appear slightly less abnormal: behaviour strange in a healthy thirty-five-year-old was more acceptable at seventy. ‘She’s even agreed to have Meals On Wheels,’ Shirley volunteered, as nobody else was saying anything.

‘That must take a bit of the burden off you,’ said Mrs Harper, lining up a peppercorn by the clove.

‘Oh yes it does,’ said Shirley. ‘It’s a wonderful service, you know.’

This innocent remark, which Shirley had injudiciously thought platitudinous enough to pass without comment, stirred her brother-in-law Steve to speech: he launched into an attack upon the City Council and the high rates, an attack guaranteed to annoy Uncle Fred, upset his mild dumb father, and plunge his brother Cliff into the deepest financial anxiety. It had been a bad year for Cliff, and it was as easy to blame the Council as anyone. On they went, the men, talking men’s talk of rates and the threatened steel strike and the Marxist lunatics at the Town Hall; of the closure of the Timperley works, of the three hundred made redundant at Brook and Partridge, of the folly of running courses of lectures at public expense in the Hartley Library on Nuclear Disarmament and Feminist Opportunities in Local Government. ‘It’s disgusting,’ contributed Mrs Harper from time to time, presenting her flat, mean, worthless little counter simply because she could not bear to remain silent, to sit back while others played, although she recognized herself temporarily outnumbered, ‘disgusting, I call it,’ and Shirley, hearing this phrase for the millionth time, had a vision of households all over Britain in which censorious, ignorant old bags like her mother-in-law, who had never done anything for the public good, who had nothing positive ever to contribute to any argument, passed judgement on others while stuffing themselves with goose and roast potatoes and sprouts and apple sauce. The backbone of the nation, the salt of the earth. And there was poor Fred, speaking up for the reviled council block in which he, unlike any of the others, lived: ‘Nay, it’s not that bad, it’s a lot of it exaggeration,’ he interposed mildly, as Steve repeated the time-worn allegation that it wasn’t safe to walk under the deck walkways for fear of having a television set or an old mattress chucked on your head: ‘Nay, it’s not that bad at all.’

‘You’d have thought your Brian could have found you somewhere a bit more comfortable,’ interposed Mrs Harper, seeing her opportunity of introducing Brian to his disadvantage, ‘he must know a few folk, it’s not only money that counts. . . .’ and her voice trailed away, as she simultaneously managed to imply that Brian had the Town Hall in the palm of his hand, and that he had enough money to buy his father a comfortable bungalow in a nice suburb whenever he felt like it. Shirley watched Fred return Mrs Harper’s grease-smeared, red-nosed gaze: affable, broad, patient, he stared at her, and wiped his mouth on his table napkin. She could see his decision not to bother to try to explain that Brian hardly knew anybody in Northam Town Hall, and that Brian’s salary as Head of Humanities at an Adult Education College hardly rose to paying his own mortgage, let alone to buying a house for his ageing father. She applauded this decision. It was not worth presenting reasoned arguments to Mrs Harper. When they appeared before her, she shifted her ground, with an agility that occasionally suggested to Shirley that perhaps she was not after all impenetrably stupid, but on some dismal level quite intelligent. ‘Nay,’ said Fred, ‘I like it where I am, it suits me where I am, I wouldn’t want to be moving at my age. I’ve been in that block since it was built, it suits me fine. There’s a grand view, you know.’ He looked at his niece Dora. ‘Your auntie loved it. We used to sit in the evenings and watch the lights come on.’ He looked back at Mrs Harper. ‘You ought to come and visit me one day. You’d be surprised.’ Mrs Harper sniffed and moved her clove half an inch.

You could see she thought Fred had cheated by mentioning his dead wife: any minute now if she didn’t watch her step he might drag in his dead daughter too. The conventions prevented her from heaping any further abuse on Chay Bank, a housing project which she had frequently and loudly denounced, but near which she had never set foot: the precariousness of her own social position would forever prevent her from visiting Fred Bowen, and this yearly ritual meeting on neutral ground was as much as she would ever dare risk.

‘You’d be surprised,’ Fred insensitively urged. ‘My Brian’s Alix thinks it’s lovely. She invited her Mum and Dad over from Leeds specially to have a look last time they were up here. We had a very nice tea.’

Now that was almost cruel, thought Shirley, as she offered second helpings. Fred had gone too far, had widened the discourse unfairly. Alix, whom Brian had so unexpectedly married, represented a world beyond articulate resentment, too remote to attack. Brian they could get at, but not Alix. They didn’t understand her well enough. They didn’t like her, but they didn’t know why.

Celia Harper, youngest child of Shirley and Cliff, too young to be allowed to escape to the disco, sat silent throughout the meal. She ate minimally. Sometimes her lips would move slightly, as though she were repeating something to herself. Nobody paid her any attention at all.

Shirley began to stack the plates. Nobody wanted any more, which was just as well, as there wasn’t much left and she couldn’t face hacking at the carcase.

Cliff would never carve. His father hadn’t carved before him, so Cliff wouldn’t carve. Fatherless Shirley knew perfectly well that most British men carved, and that it was a bit of bad luck that she happened to have married into a family where the women were expected to wield the knife. She wondered if her sister Liz carved. Probably not. That dreadful Charles would be brilliant at the job. She wheeled the trolley into the kitchen, and took the plum tart out of the oven. The oven clock said it was only five to eight. It felt like midnight, and they’d have to sit up till midnight. She’d persuaded the old folk to eat far later than usual anyway and it was still only five to eight. She wondered if there was any hope of getting them to play cards after supper instead of watching telly. She herself would much, much rather play cards. In the old days they all played cards. They’d enjoyed a game of snap or whist or gin rummy. But gradually, over the years, they had defected, as weak as the teenagers they so relentlessly criticized: they’d let the old ways lapse in order to slump like dummies in front of appalling chat shows and glimpses of the Sugar Plum Fairy and obsequious shots of the Royal Family and its corgis and babies, to goggle at old movies and new dance routines and to sit back sucking sweeties while sneering at pop stars and newscasters making fools of themselves at televised parties. The medium had been too strong for them, they had taken to it like aborigines to the bottle. Only her mother had resisted. But her mother, of course, was mad.

Two hours later, as they sat watching an Irish comedian telling jokes that she herself considered quite unsuitable for family viewing, jokes that she hoped were incomprehensible to Celia and her grandparents, the telephone rang: it was her mother, to report that Liz had not telephoned. ‘Maybe she’s waiting to ring later,’ Shirley said feebly, as a tide of rage with Liz, far away in distant London, washed through her: too absorbed in her own life, too selfish even to spend five minutes talking to her own mother.

‘She knows I don’t stay up,’ said Rita Ablewhite.

‘She may ring later,’ repeated Shirley. ‘How was your chicken?’

A short silence ensued. ‘I said, how was your chicken?’ Shirley repeated. She could hear the drone of the television from the sitting-room, the snores of her father-in-law, and her mother’s deliberate silence at the other end of the line. She could have murdered the lot of them, Irish comedian included. ‘Look, I’ve got to go now, I’ve got the kettle on for coffee,’ said Shirley. ‘The chicken was very nice,’ said her mother.

Half an hour later, the telephone went again. It was for Fred, Fred’s Brian.

‘Hello Brian,’ said Shirley, who was feeling marginally more cheerful, having managed to bring out the card-table in the midst of an argument about the relative demerits of the offerings on BBC and ITV.

‘Happy New Year, when it comes.’

‘And to you, Shirley,’ said Brian. ‘I’m not ringing too late, am I? I thought you’d still be up. Is Dad there?’

‘Yes, he is, I’ll get him for you.’ She could hear a lot of background noise, the noise of life. ‘Are you having a party?’

‘No,’ said Brian, ‘we’re not having a party, but I’m at one, I’m at your sister’s.’ He laughed his big, round, comfortable but oddly high-pitched laugh: his inoffensive laugh, defusing the reference to Liz: the soul of tact, as ever, Brian: ‘I’m at Liz’s, Alix would come. Funny world, isn’t it? You’re very good to my Dad, Shirley.’

‘Is it a good party?’

‘It’s a very up-market party. Champagne flows.’

‘How’s Alix?’

‘She’s fine. And Cliff?’

‘Not so bad. I’ll get your Dad, shall I?’

‘Thanks a lot, Shirley. I just thought I’d have a word with him. The silly old bugger still won’t have a telephone installed, you know. Barmy, that’s what he is. That’s what I tell him.’ Brian spoke with affection. She heard its authentic note. Brian could afford to be affectionate, from over a hundred miles away. She went to get Fred, who was overcome with nervous confusion and pleasure. He hated the telephone, it frightened him. ‘That you, Brian? How are you, Brian?’ he shouted. ‘What’s that? What was that?’ Technological alarm deafened him. ‘What was that? You spoke to Barbara? What’s that? Did she really? Happy New Year to you, love to Alix and Sammy. Yes, I’ll tell Dora. What was that? What was that? What?’

Triumphant, he returned to the card-table. ‘That was my Brian,’ he announced, unnecessarily. ‘Fancy that. He had a phone call from our Barbara in Australia. Fancy that. She told him to tell Dora she’d written to Auntie Flo to thank her for the cake She says why don’t I go out there on a visit. And I don’t know that I won’t. You get that, Dora? Barbara’s written to Auntie Flo about the cake.’

And he picked up his hand of cards, and surveyed it with a bewildered distracted satisfaction.

‘Whose turn is it?’ he said.

‘Yours, of course,’ said Mrs Harper, grimly: so grimly that her reply seemed like wit.

‘Sorry all,’ said Fred, and threw away a club.

‘I don’t fancy Australia, myself,’ said Dora. ‘My trick, I think. They say it’s very rough, Australia.’ She gathered in the cards, laid them neatly, criss-cross, upon her last gain.

‘It is a country with opportunities,’ said Steve: and off they went again, with their second-hand opinions, their echoes of overheard conversations, their phrases from advertisements and tabloid newspapers: and yet to Shirley there was perhaps something comfortable, despite all, something reassuring about the hands of cards, the button and matchstick money, the green baize of the table, the predictable, ancient jokes, the cigarette ends in the big red ashtray: there was safety here, of a sort, safety in repetition, safety in familiar faces and frustrations, and warmth of a sort, warmth and communion of a sort, society of a sort: the society she had discovered as a teenager, when she would slip surreptitiously out of the icy silence of Abercorn Avenue, where the clock ticked relentlessly on the kitchen wall, where Liz propped her textbooks against the Peak Freen biscuit tin on the kitchen table, where her mother sat in the front room listening to the radio, cutting up newspapers; she would let herself quietly out of the back door and creep down the passage, past the outside lav, through the back gate, round the corner, and then she would run for it, along Hilldrop Crescent, down The Grove, up Brindleford Drive, and across the main road at the lights to Victoria Street, where Cliff and Steve and their sister Marge lived. Cliff and Steve and Marge were allowed to have friends in. They even had a playroom of their own, an attic under the eaves. A gang of them would meet there, graduating from Meccano and toy farms to risqué games of Dare, illicit cigarettes, speculation about sex. Wildness and safety combined, Shirley had discovered there: they had made her welcome, they called her Shirl. Spirited she was, in those days, and she played one boy off against another, teasing, bold, louche, at times wildly immodest, shocking, provoking, drooping a ciggy from her wide wicked lip, dropping her blouse from bare shoulders, playing cards for forfeits, egging them on to experiment with Ouija, inventing naughty messages from the spirit world: how had she known these things, what models had she copied from films she had never seen, what spirit spoke through her, informing her impatient flesh?

Safety and danger, danger and safety. ‘A bad girl, that Shirley Ablewhite.’ Nobody ever said this, but she half hoped they would. She had longed to be a bad girl in those post-war years, those austerity years. But she couldn’t quite manage it: she remained a nice girl, just this side of safety. A nice girl. A small, suspicious caution held her back: a small caution teased Cliff, teased Steve, teased her friends, kept them on a hook, watching, waiting, to see how far she dared go. She was deceitful, was Shirley: downstairs, with Mr and Mrs Harper, she would be another girl, helpful, quiet, obsequious, prim, in her neat, absurdly old-fashioned blouses and skirts, her hair tied neatly back in bunches. She liked her downstairs self too, she liked the unfamiliar familiarity, the bickerings and grievances, the small change of domestic life.

Cliff and Steve both fancied Shirley. They watched her switch from the attic Shirley to the downstairs Shirley with appalled, enthralled admiration. Her inventiveness astounded them. She was the spirit of subversion. Mr and Mrs Harper thought she was a very nice girl.

Sometimes, after acquisition of a television set in Coronation year, they would all watch television together. Shirley had enjoyed that. Mr and Mrs Harper had sat in their respective armchairs, Marge had sat on a red leather pouffe and she, Steve and Cliff had occupied the two-seater settee of the three-piece suite. Cliff liked to get her in a corner but she liked to sit in the middle. There, by small wrigglings and the exercise of will, she could encourage them both to insert their hands into different parts of her clothing, her body, sometimes simultaneously. Steve’s hand would cup her breast inside her blouse, while Cliff’s would explore her suspenders, her knickers. She learned to control these manoeuvres with great expertise. The Harper parents never noticed, but continued to watch the programmes: What’s My Line, Down You Go, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, Twenty Questions, Science Review. Shirley watched the programmes too, but was occasionally distracted by an intensity of experience that sometimes approached orgasm. A communal event.

And her sister Liz sat at home, missing all the fun, deaf to the call of the flesh, with her Alternative Mathematics, her Chemistry and her Biology, wasting her youth, wasting her opportunities, obeying the will of their mother, programmed, docile, chaste, pale. One autumn night, when Liz was preparing for Oxford and Cambridge entrance, Shirley had come home at ten from the Harpers’, flushed from sexual excitement and from running through the cold streets under the yellowing smoke-scented suburban trees, her body on fire, and had found Liz still sitting where she had left her, two hours earlier, at the kitchen table, staring at the pale-green wall, as though in a catatonic trance. Shirley had clattered noisily on the linoleum, had huffed and puffed and banged about, and finally had said with some passion, ‘You’re barmy.’

And Liz had slowly swivelled her head round, and stared at her as though from a great way off, and had said dreamily, ‘If you really want something badly enough, do you think you get it?’

‘I haven’t the faintest,’ said Shirley, taking off her outdoor shoes and putting them on the rack, putting on her indoor slippers, and guiltily, belatedly, bending down to wipe the shoe marks off the linoleum with spit and hanky. She assumed her sister was referring to getting into Cambridge, which she herself considered a poisonous, disreputable fantasy, and one unlikely ever to be fulfilled: the number of girls who had achieved Cambridge places from Battersby Girls’ Grammar in the last ten years could be counted on the fingers of one hand. She sat back on her haunches, as the smear dried. ‘I don’t know,’ she repeated, more solemnly, ‘I don’t know if the amount of wanting has anything to do with the getting.’

‘It must have,’ said Liz, who sat there, burning, burning, eaten up with longing for worlds beyond her sister’s guessing: a pale effigy, locked up in imaginings. ‘It must have,’ she sighed. The imaginings were so potent that they took wing and rustled round the room, little winged souls, small bird-faced holy ghosts, emanations: the whole room was suddenly dense with the vibration of their rustling, the old-fashioned white tiles with their rounded edges glinted with their reflections, the linoleum shimmered, the kitchen cupboards shook, the morbid whiteness and greenness of the paintwork quivered, the exposed pipes trembled and knocked. The two girls held their breath, Liz sitting there with her mock examination papers, Shirley crouching by the shoe rack: their prison kitchen filled with presences. These moments carne, but they came rarely.

‘I think,’ Shirley said, softly, catching her sister’s low, dreamy, drugged tone, ‘I think it has. Yes, I think it has. What we want, we do get.’

‘If we want, for example, eternity, we get it,’ said Liz.

‘Yes. Or if we want this world, we get it.’

‘But we have to suffer for our wanting,’ said Liz.

‘Ah, that’s what I can’t stand, the suffering,’ said Shirley, jumping to her feet, her fifteen-year-old voice reasserting, boldly, frailly, the tones of elsewhere, of normality and new Bird’s Eye peas and modern kitchenettes, of television and hands fumbling inside brassières: ‘I can’t stand the suffering, I won’t suffer, I’ve had enough of suffering.’

Liz stared at her, coldly.

‘Then you won’t get,’ she said. ‘You won’t get.’

At this moment they heard their mother turn off the radio in the other room. They looked at one another.

‘What if one suffers, and suffers, and suffers,’ said Shirley, deliberately, vengefully, ‘and doesn’t get? What then?’

And Liz had shaken her head in pain at the mystery in the next room.

And still that mystery in the front room continued, reflected Shirley on New Year’s Eve 1979, as she examined the handsome features of the dangerous Queen of Spades, and wondered if the King had come out in the deal. It was a little deaf, and a little blind, the mystery, and its only friend Miss Mynors was dead, but it continued. On and on it went. There was no mercy. Whereas Liz, by some immense, visionary effort had invented her own mercy, under cover of obedience, had drawn up a secret map of escape, and had departed, and was now at this instant giving a party for hundreds of guests where champagne flowed. How could these things be? How could it be that Liz, so young, had known her way out of the maze? Was it true that the mind was wiser than the body? Shirley took a risk and played her Queen, but Cliff had the King, and she lost the trick.

She must forgive Liz. Liz was right to vanish, as the boys were right to congregate at the Maid Marian and avoid their grandmothers. It was by her own choice that she sat here. It was by her own choice that she had married Cliff, not Steve: it was she herself that had seduced Cliff, in a field of cow parsley on a May evening. She had obeyed her body, she had opened her legs, had pulled him into her and said, Now, come, now. What was, what could have been wrong about that? She had thought to free herself, through nature, through the violence of nature. But nature was cunning and had kept her trapped. What did it want her for? She had obeyed sex, she had trusted sex, she had loved sex, and it had betrayed her, had deceived her, had left her sitting here, a middle-aged housewife, mother of three, playing cards, with nothing before her but old age. Was it so? Could it be so? How had it happened? Was there maybe some other event, some other metamorphosis awaiting her? Or was this it? Shirley, sitting there mildly, the downstairs Shirley, thinking these thoughts, remembering the peremptory demands of the old, the attic Shirley, felt trembling in her, deep deep buried in her sitting-room centrally heated flesh, a wild improper memory, an admissible echo, the faintest thrill of a shudder of remembered desire: Shirley Ablewhite, the bad-good girl, called to her through the knot of her body, painfully, angrily, buried, buried alive, and Shirley Harper half heard her, bent her head, and acknowledged with mixed fear and relief the stirring, the tremor, the sulking, menacing, sweet and half despairing plea.

Cliff was winning. His pile of matchsticks was considerable. He had had a succession of good hands and won the kitty twice. Now he was playing recklessly, sportingly, trying to let the others in, but he couldn’t help winning, it seemed. His mind wasn’t on the game at all: it was on balance sheets and interest rates and VAT and cash flow and overdraft facilities. Overextended, that’s what they were, too many orders and not enough money to buy the gear. Borrow, said his partner Jim, borrow, but look at the price of borrowing. Sums flitted through his head as he won another unlikely trick with a paltry Knave. Jim was all for going on, for expanding, for advancing rather than retreating, but Cliff was beginning to think that after all he hadn’t the temperament for it, he couldn’t stand the anxiety, he didn’t enjoy the suspense: all he wanted was security, independence, freedom from worry, being his own man. That was all. Nothing too extravagant. But it was true, what Jim said, in business you can’t stand still, you go up or you go down, you can’t just sit comfortably in your own 1972 executive four-bedroomed plate-glass-windowed centrally heated wall-to-wall-carpeted gadget-equipped house, with your Rover and your wife’s Mini in the two-car garage, and your pot plants in your loggia, and your electric lawn mower in the shed: you can’t sit still and enjoy it, you can’t call it a day and call a halt when you own it all and don’t owe anyone a penny, you have to go on and on, relentlessly onwards, juggling with larger and larger sums, owing more, paying out more, until finally perhaps the whole thing comes tumbling round your head like a pack of cards. Jim was right: you had to go on. Risks were part of the game. He’d enjoyed them himself when he was younger. Always ready to accept a challenge, his school reports had said. It wasn’t the hard work he minded, he liked work, he liked long hours, he didn’t want to slack off: it was the anxiety he couldn’t stand. Where was it going to end? Inflation made one run to stand still. What if one ran and slipped backwards? A nightmare world. Maybe after all he’d have been better off like his Dad, quietly pushing papers round a desk in an office at the Gas Board for nine hours a day for nearly fifty years. A living death, it had seemed to him and Jim, but maybe it hadn’t been so bad. It had been safe, at least.

They were still talking about Australia, the land of opportunity. Fred’s Barbara had gone out there with her bricklayer husband and now he had a building firm and employed ten men. Cliff and Jim employed twenty, making screw-on wing-mirror attachments and assembling picnic sets.

‘It’s coming up for midnight,’ said Shirley, with some relief, pointing at the quartz carriage clock on the mantelpiece. They consulted watches, nodded agreement. ‘Somebody ought to go out and come in again with a lump of coal,’ said Dora. ‘Isn’t that what we usually do?’

‘We didn’t last year,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘We forgot. We were watching that Scottish comedian in Trafalgar Square on telly.’

‘A dark-haired man, it has to be,’ said Dora. ‘That’s you, Steve.’

Cliff looked at Steve, ran his hands through his own hair, and said, ‘That’s right, Steve. I’ve got plenty left, but it’s the wrong colour. Yours is bearing up well. Touch it up, do you? What’s that stuff called? Grecian?’

Steve hit his brother playfully but rather hard on the shoulder.

‘Where’s the coal, Shirley?’

‘We haven’t got any coal. Oil-fired, we are.’

‘What’s the next best thing?’

‘Some people,’ said Shirley, ‘have those fake gas fires now, you know, they look like real coal fires, with lumps of stuff like real coal, and real ashes. But it’s all fake. They’re quite nice. Something to look at.’

‘Go on, out you go, Steve,’ said Dora. ‘Take something black. It’s for luck. You’re to bring it in in a shovel.’

‘We never used to do this when I was a girl,’ said Mrs Harper. ‘Did they in your family, Dad?’

Her husband nodded and smiled, but whether he had heard the question or not, who could say.

‘What does it mean?’ said Shirley.

‘It’s for luck,’ said Dora. ‘First footing. It’s for luck.’

‘They do it up in Newcastle,’ volunteered Fred. ‘It’s a Geordie custom, I’ve heard say. Go on, Steve, we could all do with a bit of luck. Out you go.’

And Steve obediently went off, taking with him a jar of Marmite in a garden trowel as a substitute for coal in a shovel, and he stood out there on the front porch in the cold listening to the silence and looking at the stars, waiting for them to let him in on the last stroke of Big Ben on the radio: a faint, feeble echo of some once meaningful ritual, though what it had meant or now could mean nobody there knew or had ever known. And thus, all over Northam, all over Britain, ill-remembered, confused, shadowy vestigial rites were performed, rites with origins lost in antiquity; Celtic, Pict, Roman, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Elizabethan, Hanoverian, Judaic rites: mistletoe dangled from drawing-pins and picture rails, golden stars shone on the Christmas Trees of Prince Albert and geese and haggis and hams lay heavy on the digestion of some, while others laughed themselves silly or sick on rum and coke at the Maid Marian New Year’s Superdisco. Steve Harper, haulage contractor, stood outside alone for a grateful crisp smokeless moment of silence, and when they opened the door to him a strange shadow of the night sidled in with him from prehistory. Shirley Harper touched the locket at her throat, for luck, a superstition she had had since childhood. ‘Happy New Year,’ they said to one another, inadequately, shivering a little. Something was absent, yet something was present. The shadow filled the corners of the broad bright hallway. A pitiful exhalation, an obscurity, a memory. A homeless ghost. The eight-year-old house perched precariously on the raw earth, amongst other isolated, precarious, detached houses, their lights shining on the dark hillside. No one had lived on that hillside for nineteen centuries. The Brigantes had held it once, against the Romans, but they had retreated to the mountains and left it to gorse and the bracken. And so it had remained until the scoops and cranes and bulldozers of 1970s Post-Industrial Man had moved in to uproot the scrub and to build the suburb known as Greystone Edge. A few Bronze Age artifacts were turned up in the dark soil, but they had meant nothing to those who had seen them, and they had been turned back into the earth. Here Venutius, leader of the Brigantes, had crouched in the night by his camp fire dwelling on the treachery of his faithless queen Cartimandua, who had sold her people to the Romans. A tragic theme. Here the Harper clan gather, a small tribe, frail, ageing, on the threshold of 1980, in the presence of the sky: here thirteen-year-old Celia, young, aspiring, judgemental, reflects upon the past, as, long after her usual bedtime, she looks up at the stars and plots her own future. On the threshold of Brock Bank the Harpers gather, bidding one another good night beneath the moon. What obscure blood runs in their veins? Who could have drawn the roots, the branches, the fibres, the tendrils that have fed them and bound them? Ancestral voices whisper from the young dry garden hedge, as Steve starts up his Ford Cortina. Shirley keeps her finger on her locket which rests on her throat like a warm stethoscope. She thinks of her mother. She thinks of her father, whom she has never known, of whom she knows nothing, almost nothing, but whose image, it is alleged, is in that locket: an image which also hangs in an identical locket at this moment around her sister’s neck. A prized possession. Shirley is tired, fatigue has overwhelmed anxiety and desire: she hopes her two boys will come home soon, and go to bed quietly. She waves goodbye.

In 8, Abercorn Avenue, Rita Ablewhite lies in bed in the dark. She is not asleep. She is waiting for the clock downstairs to strike twelve. When it strikes, she will shut her eyes. When she was a girl, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, she could hear the steam trains’ celebratory whistle beyond the crossing down Station Road. Now she hears nothing but the sounds of her own house. When she was a girl, she could lie in bed and hear her mother and father talking in the next room. When she was a young woman, she could hear distant laughter down long corridors, as she lay in her bed. Now she hears nothing but the sounds of her own house. And she does not hear them as well as she did once. She lies there in the dark, with her eyes open, keeping watch.

When Liz Headleand woke on the first day of 1980 and found herself in bed with her husband, she remembered instantly the scene of the night before, and wondered how she could ever have been so upset by it. Lying there at seven o’clock in the morning, suddenly wide awake, as was her manner, it seemed to her quite obvious that she and Charles should get divorced: it had surely long been inevitable, and if Charles really wanted to marry that woman (or had he perhaps been joking? – no, perhaps not), well then, let him. She had plenty to get on with meanwhile. Why ever had she taken it so badly? She had an embarrassed recollection of having burst into tears, of demanding to know how long the affair with Henrietta had been going on. I must have been tired, she said to herself reasonably. Tired and a little drunk. All those people in the house. That’s what it was.

Charles was still heavily asleep. Unlike her, he was not good in the mornings. He lay solidly. She left him there, and went to have a bath: dressed briskly, went downstairs to inspect the damage, had a coffee, looked at her list for the day. It was New Year’s Day, Bank Holiday, but, bizarrely, for her a working day. She had to attend a conference at the Metropole Hotel organized by a group of Japanese psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. They did not recognize the British calendar, or, indeed, she was later to discover, their own: their first choice of conference date had been Boxing Day, but from this they had been dissuaded. The group were admirers of the dissident English Freudian, Jay Spenser, who was unaccountably famous in Japan: they had invited Liz to give a paper on Theseus and the Minotaur: Spenser’s Version of the Family Romance. She wondered what they would make of it as she got out the vacuum cleaner and started to run it over the drawing-room carpet. Would they understand her? Would she understand them? Foster children, stepchildren, institution children. She had no idea of how these patterns were formed in Japan, nor why the Japanese should have any interest in her paper, or in Karl Auerbach’s, or Gertrude Feinstein’s. Stepchildren. What would her own stepchildren say to her divorce from their father? The vacuum cleaner ran smoothly, efficiently over the rich dark-yellow pile, collecting cigarette ash, canapé crumbs, scattered bulb fibre; her mind sang with a faint clear high-pitched hum like a well-serviced machine. She listened to it with an expert ear. It sounded all right, but was there something slightly odd about the tuning, some as yet almost imperceptible new thin whine? She tested it with the concept of Henrietta, and yes, undoubtedly it responded, changing its frequency to an angry buzz before returning to its smooth hum. Henrietta. Zezeee, zezeeee. Henrietta. Zezeeee, zezeeee. Like stepping on an accelerator. The buzz of jealousy. But how could one be jealous of a stick, a statue? The vacuum cleaner, sensing her lack of concentration, took advantage of it to munch and slaver up a long strand of rug fringe: there was a smell of burning rubber. Shit, said Liz, she knelt down to unwind it. She had learned bad language from her stepsons. She struggled with the string of rug. Would they continue to be her stepsons, if she and Charles were to divorce? Would they become the stepsons of Henrietta? Of course they would. Rage possessed her and her mind zinged furiously, smelling of burning rubber. She did not worry about Sally and Stella: they were hers, her blood and body, for ever. But Jonathan, but Aaron, but Alan. Her boys, and not her boys. What was her claim to them now? What sudden right had Henrietta Latchett to her three boys? Calm down, calm down, she told herself, they are all grown up, they need neither of you, this has nothing to do with them, they will not even notice. But rage continued. The buzz of jealousy. So this was it. She had seen something of it professionally, and had thought herself exempt.

For her predecessor, Naomi, she had felt none. It had not been required. Naomi Headleand, who had been killed so tragically, so tragically young, when driving herself quietly and soberly home from Glyndebourne one night. Young, beautiful, innocent, rich, she had, it was claimed, been killed instantly when an oncoming overtaking car had lost control and collided, head-on, with hers. She had died instantly, of internal, invisible injuries. When the police arrived, ten minutes later, her car was still singing: from the radio swelled the fifth symphony of Sibelius, representing eternity. Where could jealousy enter here? A young, a beautiful, a fairy-story mother, dying with the greatest of grace, as immortality asserted itself and pledged its reassurance in the night air of her departure. A potent myth, but a friendly one. Liz had felt herself to be close to Naomi, as she nursed Naomi’s children, slept with Naomi’s husband, took tea or sherry with Naomi’s parents, helped to form the childish letters which her stepchildren wrote to Naomi’s parents thanking them for presents, for outings. She had never met Naomi in her life, but in death she grew to love her: she had taken her into herself, had learned her likings, had read her books and tried (although not herself musical) to listen to her music, she had spoken much of her to the children, had insisted upon treating her as an ally, as a friend beyond the grave, had reinvented her and kept her close to them – oh, not without awareness of the dangers, of the necessary distortions and consolations, but then all life is danger, and Liz had embarked willingly upon its full tide with those three small boys, with that ambitious, importunate widower and that friendly ghost. A great adventure, a fitting enterprise for one who had known herself from infancy to be set apart for some rare destiny, and one that she had thought herself to have pursued courageously, successfully, with a redeeming love that had rescued even the anguished, complex, hostile Aaron, and had saved him from his wilder flights. How magically her love for the boys had developed into, contrasted with, reinforced her different but equally powerful passion for her daughters: how strange but inevitable had appeared the five-pointed constellation of their heroic family.

Accomplished. Yes, well, perhaps that was the point. She collected glasses on a tray. She picked a dying leaf from a branchy green-pink flecked begonia. She answered the telephone, thanked the Martellis for thanking her for the party. She would look for their gloves, would ring back if she found them. She restacked the dishwasher. The whole house was still sleeping, although it was half past nine. She read the paper. She was not due at the Metropole until twelve. She would walk there. The morning gaped, endless. She switched on the radio and switched it off again. She heard Charles move across the landing to his own room and run a bath. Of course they should divorce. She had often thought of it herself, had once or twice in low or high moments suggested it. But was nevertheless outraged, outraged, that the suggestion should have come from Charles. Had he meant it? Yes, he had meant it, she had no doubt. It was up to her, quickly, to forge herself a manner that would give her an advantage in whatever negotiations were to come: and she had done so, by the time he came down for his breakfast. She greeted him with a pot of coffee and a brisk, slightly mocking, offhand smile. She would treat him as a delinquent, a time-waster, a bad child, whose offences could only be petty. She would refuse to allow that the matter was serious, or that its consequences could affect her profoundly. A minor irritation. Yes, that was the line.

But it did not, she found, come very naturally to her. Breakfast was not pleasant. They spoke of indifferent things, but her mind, resenting too tight a control, kept whining away with its own questions. What would happen to the house? Whose house was it, anyway? Legally, morally? What would the children think? What would Edgar think? What would the world think? What was it like, life in the 1980s for a woman on her own? How much would it devalue her? Whatever could a man like Charles see in Henrietta? What had been lacking in her that he had found in Henrietta? What had she done wrong? Should she feel guilt? Should she feel shame? What would her solicitor say? Was it true that she had neglected Charles, as he sometimes claimed? She had always thought he was joking. How could one neglect a man who was never there? Was he never there because she had neglected him?

And these questions pursued her, buzzing like mosquitoes, as she walked up Marylebone High Street with her briefcase, as she crossed the Edgware Road, as she joined the conference group for sherry in the Westminster Suite, as she discovered that Edgar had rightly warned her that conversing with Japanese was not easy, as she ate her indifferent luncheon of Maryland chicken, as she listened to Professor Yamamoto speak on Spenser’s reinterpretation of Freud’s interpretation of folie à deux in the classic case of Orphan Eva and her mother, as she delivered her own paper, as she attempted desperately to follow the ensuing discussion, of which she could grasp only one word in ten: all through this crazy jumble of non-language and misunderstanding, of erudition and impenetrable obscurity, of meaningless signs and uninterpretable eye contact, the mosquitoes buzzed and nipped and drew blood. By six, at the end of the session, she was exhausted, demoralized. She took a taxi home. She felt herself, beneath the pricks and stings, to be growing ill. Charles had made her ill. She needed comfort, reassurance. She would ring Alix. She would tell Alix. She knew that in speaking to Alix her voice would find its normal level, her mind would return to its normal tuning. She could rely on Alix. But when she got back and dialled Alix’s number, Alix was out. Liz replaced the receiver and tried to keep calm, but she could feel panic, fever, tears approaching. Charles had gone out. To see Henrietta, to his club? He had left no word. She sat in her study and stared at the telephone. If I were my patient, she asked herself, would I prescribe myself a tranquillizer? Is this what people feel like when they request tranquillizers? She rang Esther. Esther too was out. She went back into the drawing room and poured herself a whisky and soda. She switched on the television.

Alix Bowen was out because for her, too, New Year’s Day was a working day, of sorts. She had to go to the Garfield Centre, where she taught one day a week, to see the inmates perform their Christmas entertainment. She had promised to go. They would be angry with her if she did not go. But when she got into the car at five, ready for the fifteen-mile drive across London, it wouldn’t start. The battery felt flat. It clicked and died on her. No life in it at all. It hadn’t been such a cold night, what had happened? She did not understand cars. She sat there crossly. There was absolutely no way of getting from Wandsworth to Wanley except by car, or none that did not involve at least four methods of public transport. It was not easy even by car. In fact, it was a ridiculous journey, and one that annoyed her regularly once a week. The car had been behaving all right the night before, when Brian had driven them back from Liz’s. It always behaved for Brian. She switched it on again. A faint but more hopeful splutter, this time. She switched off, quickly. She would have to get Brian. Brian wouldn’t mind being got, but he would laugh. Her feet were cold. Perhaps she would put on another pair of socks. But it was always so hot, in the Centre.

Brian did laugh. He patted her on the shoulder, then he hugged her, and laughed.

‘You look so miserable,’ he said. ‘It’s wonderful. It’s only a car.’

‘I know it’s only a car,’ she said, peevishly, shifting from one foot to another on the damp pavement. ‘And it won’t bloody well start. What’s the point of a car that won’t start?’

It started at once, for Brian. They listened to it. It sounded perfectly well, for Brian.

‘There you go,’ he said, getting out, putting his arm round her.

‘I’m a fool,’ she said.

‘We’re all fools,’ said Brian. ‘It’s a foolish world.’

‘You’re not a fool,’ said Alix. ‘You’re a saint.’

‘No, you’re the saint,’ he said. ‘And you look very nice in your new woolly hat. Off you go, they’ll be howling for you.’

‘Don’t forget about the boiled potatoes.’

‘I’ve got plans for those potatoes.’

‘Fry-up plans?’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘I’ll see you later.’

‘Drive carefully.’

And off she went, driving carefully, through South London, and east, and under the river, and north, and up the A113, towards the Garfield Centre, thinking of Brian frying up the cold boiled potatoes for himself and their son Sam, chopping parsley, frying eggs and bacon, delicious; Brian handled the frying pan as confidently as he handled the car, eggs never broke for Brian, he had a firm grasp of the material world, of pan handles and gear levers and of her own warm body, of garden spades and wayward boilers, of carving knives and power drills and saws and scissors and invisible screws; he treated all these things as his friends and allies, an Ideal Husband, she sometimes teased him: and yet, and yet, he spent his days and his nights teaching abstractions, he spent his time with words, words, words. To this he had aspired. How could it be otherwise? From paradox to paradox we travel, onwards, from ourselves. And what on earth was she herself playing at, crossing the urban wastes so regularly to teach a bunch of delinquent girls, a bunch of criminals, for £15.60 a night? It hardly covered the petrol. It probably didn’t cover the petrol, if she sat down to work it out, which she didn’t. What an ill-organized, hotchpotch, casually assembled, patchwork life. Everything seemed to have happened by accident, even the things that lasted. Her job at Garfield, her three days a week in Whitehall, the house in Wandsworth, her furniture, Sam’s school, a series of accidents. None of it had been intended. She could have done such things. But she had always been, it seemed, too busy to stop and take stock, too busy to plan, too busy to rationalize. However did people manage to discipline themselves and stick to a single line for long enough to gain control, to come out on top, to become the boss instead of the employee? At Liz’s party, last night, there had been bosses: Charles himself was an archetypal boss, and if one didn’t know Liz so well one might think she was one too. That chap Lazenby appeared, improbably, to be a boss, despite his glaring character defects. Of course, Brian himself was a boss, if one counted being Head of Humanities in a poorly funded and now much-threatened Adult Education Institute as being a boss. One couldn’t so count it, in her view. He employed nobody, he was employed, and precariously employed at that. Not even his so-called students thought of him as a figure of authority. But at least Brian had a job with a name. Whereas I scurry aimlessly from this to that, thought Alix, as she drove through the dark evening: they block one path, I try another, and so it goes on, thought Alix, who at times thought no such thing, and was not thinking it now with much conviction. It was the car that had annoyed her.

But the car now proved obedient, and the north-east London suburbs received her, soothing her as they usually but not invariably did with their eloquent monotony, their repetitive regularities, street after street of semi-detached houses, their lights lit, their curtains drawn, their television sets humming, their inhabitants safe within. An orderly life on either side of the dual carriageway, the illusion of an orderly life. In spring there would be pink blossom at regular intervals. Nice, quiet, safe, dull, desirable. Desirable residences. How the owners of these desirable residences had complained ten years ago when they found that the Garfield Centre was going to be built in their neighbourhood. Nobody wants prisoners or lunatics on their doorstep, and there had been a well-fought campaign to demonstrate that the women of Garfield would be both prisoners and lunatics. Even an optimist like Alix found people depressing when they revealed themselves in this manner. She made excuses for them, but she found them depressing.

Mile after mile, ribbons of roads. What was going on, behind those closed curtains? Were people peacefully frying up potatoes, or were they hitting one another on the head with their frying pans? Alix liked to let her mind wander over the map of Britain, asking herself which interiors she could visualize, which not. She aspired to a more comprehensive vision. She aspired to make connections. She and Liz, over supper together, often spoke of such things. Their own stories had strangely interlocked, and sometimes she had a sense that such interlockings were part of a vaster network, that there was a pattern, if only one could discern it, a pattern that linked these semi-detached houses of Wanley with those in Leeds and Northam, a pattern that linked Liz’s vast house in Harley Street with the Garfield Centre towards which she herself now drove. The social structure greatly interested Alix. She had once thought of herself as unique, had been encouraged (in theory at least) by her education and by her reading to believe in the individual self, the individual soul, but as she grew older she increasingly questioned these concepts: seeing people perhaps more as flickering impermanent points of light irradiating stretches, intersections, threads, of a vast web, a vast network, which was humanity itself: a web of which much remained dark, apparently but not necessarily unpeopled: peopled by the dark, the unlit, the dim spirits, as yet unknown, the past and the future, the dead, the unborn: and herself, and Brian, and Liz, and Charles, and Esther, and Teddy Lazenby, and Otto and Caroline Werner, and all the rest of them at that bright party, and in these discreet anonymous dark curtained avenues and crescents were but chance and fitful illuminations, chance meetings, chance and unchosen representatives of the thing itself. We are all but a part of a whole which has its own, its distinct, its other meaning: we are not ourselves, we are crossroads, meeting places, points on a curve, we cannot exist independently for we are nothing but signs, conjunctions, aggregations.

Liz and Alix sometimes talked of this vision. Liz had a more robust notion of the self, and took another line on the individual’s place in the structure. Each suspected the other (each suspected) of personal, biographical reasons for arguing the case that each, by and large, argued: and the difference between them was in itself odd, as in the great graph of time and place their paths had oddly crossed and oddly coincided. How strange it was, after all, that Alix out of the whole of Britain should have married Brian Bowen whose father was the uncle of Liz’s sister-in-law. Or was this perhaps not odd at all? Alix was not sufficiently numerate to be able to calculate the odds against such an apparently odd relationship, though she could not help but feel that its component, accidental parts were startlingly combined. Was there, could there be, a computer that could work out these things? That could prove, perhaps, that it was yet more odd that Liz’s sister’s sister-in-law had not met and married, for instance, Teddy Lazenby? She must ask Otto Werner of this one day: Otto had a new passion for computers, and loved to speculate on their possibilities.

Otto’s wife Caroline, for instance, was alleged to be Edgar Lintot’s cousin, though this had not emerged in the days when Liz Ablewhite had been briefly married to Edgar Lintot. At the thought of Caroline Werner, a small shadow of anxiety crossed over Alix’s party recollections: the Werners were coming to dinner with the Bowens the following week, and what should she give them to eat? Otto did not care, did not notice what he ate, which was rather a waste, really, as Caroline Werner was a first-class cook, and wrote cookery books. Alix found this daunting, although Caroline took great pains not to daunt, and was on other, non-culinary matters, a perfectly acceptable noncompetitive person. But the knowledge of Caroline’s expertise hung heavily, at times, on Alix: heavily, too, hung the knowledge that Caroline was such an unpretentious, agreeable woman that she would be quite happy to eat a plateful of fried-up boiled potatoes, parsley, bacon and scrambled eggs.

Liz had sidestepped the problem, last night, with caterers, and with Deirdre Kavanagh. Alix could not have afforded this solution, and would have thought it cheating had she been able to afford it, although she thoroughly despised herself for these scruples.

Female roles, female inadequacies, parties, social life. Liz’s chandelier had glittered bravely. Gatherings, glitterings, a faint perfume. How had Liz managed it, this assembly? It was against the laws of nature, unnatural. Alix arrived at the gates, at the high wall, with its discreetly disguised barbed wire, at the porter’s lodge. There was Stanley, one-handed Stanley, hook-handed Stanley, listening in his little hut to his radio. Stanley loves music, as he often says. A Viennese waltz drifted into the January night. Stanley greeted her, wished her a Happy New Year, glanced perfunctorily at her pass, admitted her. Alix drove on to the staff car park, as Technicolor Viennese figures in ball gowns, wearing ruby pendants, flowered corsages, turned in her mind, in a scene that derived less from Vienna (where she had never been) than from Tolstoy’s descriptions of balls in War and Peace. Once long ago, Otto Werner’s father had danced with Esther Breuer’s mother, on New Year’s Eve, in Vienna, in 1925: but neither of them remembers the incident, and therefore, perhaps, it does not exist? What computer, what analysis, could ever retrieve it? Alix’s godmother, also named Alix, had once been to a ball in Vienna. Alix herself had been to a May Ball or two in Cambridge, in her dancing days. These are now over, thank God, she thinks, as she makes her way towards the discreetly locked, discreetly monitored side gate.

The temperature is high in Garfield on Tuesday, 1 January 1980. Here it is party time, here also there is glitter. Alix could feel the heat at once, embodied in more than the pink and green balloons, the paper chains, the tinsel. Garfield, of all the institutions in which she had ever worked, was most responsive to mood, to atmosphere; it shifted and changed from day to day, from week to week, for it had, like the larger society of her larger imagining, its own corporate, its own embodied spirit, all the more powerful for its caging, its high barbed wire, its high walls. On some evenings, the place was dull, impassive, stifled, solid with boredom: on some evenings it grumbled ominously, with violence, waiting for Lights Out; on some evenings it was studious, attentive, solemn; and on other evenings, like this, it sang with a high, sweet, feverish erotic intensity, a claustrophobic glamour, an emotional throb. This was a sweet evening. Alix found herself embraced, caressed, her hand held, her hair stroked, her new striped woolly hat with its purple bobble extravagantly admired. These liberties were permitted. This was a liberal régime, the only régime of its kind in the country. Sometimes Alix shook off the liberties irritably, but tonight she submitted, responding to the petting, intimate, female warmth; she kissed and was kissed, she thanked them for their Christmas cards, she wished them a Happy New Year, she shook hands with the older women, she laughed and felt safe with her friends, she made no effort to repel their eager affection. (It did not always go this way: sometimes they sulked and abused her, sometimes they threatened her and one another, sometimes they would not attend class.) The wardens, Eric and Hannah Glover, welcomed her with more restraint but equal friendliness and introduced her to a man from the Home Office who had come to visit – well, to inspect, in effect, but the mood was holiday, informal, and the man from the Home Office smiled with the rest of them. There were sandwiches and cups of coffee. The half-hour’s entertainment was due to begin at eight thirty: some relatives, waiting now patiently in the hall, had been admitted, but were not allowed backstage to mingle. Freedom, but not too much freedom. Some of those taking part were already in costume: Jilly Fox was wearing what looked like an Iranian chadour, contrived from a sheet, Karen Gray was dressed up as a nurse, and Bob Saxby who taught pottery was encased in a Michelin-man spacesuit which he claimed was an Arctic explorer’s sleeping bag. ‘Imagine, man, trying to kip in this,’ he kept asking, to anyone who would listen, as he demonstrated the inconvenience of his garb. Innocent, innocent, like schoolchildren, the thieves and murderers. Toni Hutchinson stroked Alix’s arm, possessively, affectionately, wheedling out of her the story of the party of the night before: ‘So you wore your blue dress? And did you put your hair up? Did it stay up?’ She liked to tease Alix about her hair, which was forever wispily descending from its large wooden slide: Toni’s own curled neatly in angelic dyed blonde braids, and sometimes on request she had given Alix lessons in hair management, but Alix could not, would not learn.

The entertainment reminded Alix of the end-of-term pantomime at school, a regular feature of her own girlhood. The same rows of uncomfortable chairs, the same improvised curtains, the same primitive lighting effects, the same take-off versions of popular songs, the same in-jokes, the same attempts at topicality, the same satirical renderings of figures of authority. One girl produced a more than passable imitation of Hannah Glover’s dress and mannerisms, in a sketch in which the pseudo-Hannah reprimanded a contrite inmate for ‘smoking in the bog’: the shapeless woolly cardigan over the wrongly buttoned blouse, the broad-seated tweed skirt, the slipping petticoat, the spectacles constantly removed and polished on the slipping petticoat and replaced, the sensible shoes, one with a trailing shoelace, the repeated exhortation to ‘help us to help you’, the earnest smiling and the short-sighted blinking, the flat Midlands accent. Cruel, a little, but not savage: Alix could see Hannah smiling gamely, taking it in good part, and wondered if she was also taking in the rather subtle sub-text of allusions to drugs other than nicotine. One could never tell how blind Hannah’s blind eye really was. It was Eric’s turn next: his presenter appeared in jogging track suit, and false beard, and needed to do little more than puff heavily round the stage several times intoning ‘no, not on the roof, no, not on the roof’, to bring the house down, rousing laughter even from those who did not know that these were the mysterious words that the Warden had uttered in a loud cry when abruptly roused from slumber during a session of group therapy. One of two of the visiting psychiatrists were brought forth in a psychiatric chorus, singing in psychobabble: Bob Saxby was presented giving a learned discourse on the nature of the pot, insisting reassuringly in a phrase that needed no exaggeration, so frequently was it heard from him in real life, that ‘a few irregularities add charm to a pot’. An example of a charming pot was produced, to much mirth. Alix herself was not mimicked, or not that she could see: she did not know whether this was a sign of affection, contempt, or indifference. Jilly Fox did a rather well-informed feminist sketch comparing the chaplain’s sexist attitudes to those of the Ayatollah: it wasn’t very funny and the chaplain was not amused, although he wisely pretended to be. Then Jilly cast off her chadour and sang, a plaintive rendering of ‘The Winter of Seventy-Nine’, and suddenly, as happens on these occasions, the knockabout mood changed, people stopped laughing, tears stood in eyes, as Jilly’s harsh, grating flat voice lamented the year and deplored the future, as her white, beaky, angry face gazed fiercely at the audience, as the confined energy of months swelled up in self-pity around the room, orchestrated by Jilly’s incantation:

All you kids that just sit in line,

You should have been there back in seventy-nine.

sang Jilly:

In the winter of seventy-nine,

When all the gay geezers got put inside,

The coloured kids were getting crucified,

A few fought back and a few folks died,

Yes, a few of us fought, and a few of us died,

In the winter of seventy-nine,

Back in seventy-nine,

sang, angrily, menacingly, Jilly Fox.

Jilly Fox had been educated at an expensive boarding-school. She was doing time for several rather serious drug-related offences. She was having an affair with Toni Hutchinson of the blonde braids, who was the daughter of a pharmacist in Hendon. Jilly had passed her A level in English Literature the summer before, having notably failed to acquire any qualifications except a pass in O level Divinity at her expensive school: now she was hoping to qualify for a course at the Open University. Jilly Fox had once said bleakly to Alix Bowen on a bad evening that her release would be the death of her. Alix feared this might be true.

Alix, driving home, thought that Hannah Glover probably had been rather hurt, despite her appearance of good humour. She was vulnerable, still, after years of inevitable disappointments, years of failure. She said she liked to think that the younger women looked on her as a mother, but of course they didn’t: they found her faintly ridiculous, old-fashioned, gullible, naïve. She would never have been able to operate without her husband Eric, who for all his bluff and jolly manner was in practice a hard man, a no-nonsense man, who sent trouble-makers back where they came from, into the main prison system, without any heart-searchings or regrets. Maybe, thought Alix, that mild, concerned approach of Hannah’s is all a front, devised between them over the years, consciously or unconsciously, to mediate, to palliate, to distract attention? Her own parents had played such a game, but in their case it was her father who had played the mild, the foolish role. God, what a fool he had been, was. Many times during the past evening he had returned to her, in ludicrous, colourful, brightly painted effigy, all his embarrassments clustered and clanging round him, all his mannerisms protruding, projected, enhanced: the sharp red nose, the usually broken bifocal spectacles, the striped woolly lunch-spattered waistcoats, the bald shining brown freckled Professor Branestawm brow, the pockets full of string, the green socks and brown sandals, the little pedantries, the favourite quotations, the antiquarian commentary, the hydrometer, the tufts of hair in his ears, the batty, potty, dotty, hurt, persistent grin. Dotty Doddridge, Deputy Head, French teacher. What a buffoon, what a butt, what a caricature. How she had suffered for him, for her poor pitiable ridiculous father, how she had hated her cruel peers for their relentless mocking, how she had dreaded each Christmas pantomime, each school-leavers’ farewell, each assembly that she knew her father was due to conduct, each occasion on which she heard him open his mouth in public. The disorder, the whisperings, the giggles, the open contempt! And her mother, in revenge, in reaction, brusque, tart, offhand, cutting, feared, fearing and avoided, uneasily detached, dismissively remote. Large conspicuous wooden figures, Dotty and Dolly, and beneath their knees skulked little Alix Doddridge, creeping quietly, smiling obsequiously, keeping a low profile, longing to be ordinary, longing with such passion to be unnoticed, to be accepted, to be one of the crowd, not Dotty’s Daughter, with all that that implied.

Ah well, her parents were old now, and retired, and nobody thought them funny any more: indeed, it was only the intensely conventional world of a Yorkshire boarding-school that had made them seem so eccentric in the first place. They were now revealed as what they had always been, not figures of fun, not left-wing political extremists, not loony vegetarians (though they were vegetarians), but harmless, mild, Labour-voting, CND-supporting, Fabian pamphlet-reading intellectuals, of a species that Alix now knew to be far from extinct. Odd, though, that they had once seemed so odd, so isolated, for the school at which Dotty Doddridge vainly endeavoured to teach French had been nonconformist, faintly progressive, certainly egalitarian in its religious and social complexion: it had offered a liberal, secularized, healthy coeducation, and had on its foundation in the 1860s set out to attract the children of vegetarians, Quakers, freethinkers, pacifists, Unitarians, reformers. Its academic success had been such that it had become progressively less progressive, its original zeal swamped by the fee-paying prosperous solid Northern conservatism of parents and offspring: it had become a bastion of respectability, its one-time principles upheld by stray survivors like Doddridge, who appeared blithely not to notice that at election time the entire school, with one or two flamboyant exceptions, howled its enthusiasm for the Tory Party. A rum evolution, Alix had often thought, though it had not seemed strange at the time: what had then seemed strange, in her girlhood, had been her parents’ quaint socialist ideals, which had caused her such embarrassment, and, partly because of that embarrassment, had inspired in her such undeviating loyalty. ‘I say, does your Dad really vote Labour?’ had been one of the politer questions addressed to her at elections and other periods of heightened political interest. ‘My Dad’s a Socialist,’ Alix would mumble in reply, aged eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, thinking that the word ‘Socialist’ sounded somehow more acceptable, more intellectual, than the dreadful word ‘Labour’, with its connotations of manual toil and prison routine. From the age of fifteen onwards she became more defiant, and would sometimes even attempt a half-baked account of some of the notions she had heard discussed at home, in the Deputy Master’s Lodge. She began to affect, in History lessons, an interest in the Soviet Union: such was the climate of opinion in this progressive boarding school in the north of England in the early 1950s, amongst the sons and daughters of tradesmen and doctors, industrialists and university lecturers, dentists and estate agents, lawyers and farmers, that her interest was regarded with awe and alarm or with frank disbelief, by those who did not dismiss it as the affectation which, in fact, at this stage it was. Nobody, during the Cold War, was interested in the Soviet Union, not even Alix herself, not even her parents, who never mentioned the place. It was taboo. Indeed, her father had shocked her by breaking this silence and by advising her, when she went up to Cambridge, not to join the Communist Party: a joke’s a joke, he told her but you don’t want trouble with visas if ever you want to go to America. A surprisingly worldly comment, from so innocent a man, she had thought this.

Cambridge had been different. There had been Communists there. There had been the lot, or so it had seemed, at Cambridge: socialists, communists, socialites, die-hard dinner-jacketed Pitt Club Tories, Bohemians, Christians, lacrosse and rugger players, sloggers, poets, actors, Leavisites, wits, bores, eccentrics, homosexuals; to Cambridge they flocked, from ancient grammar-schools, upstart grammar-schools, progressive schools, public schools, private schools, even from private tutors in the South of France. God’s plenty. Looking back from the eclectic seventies, the essentially post-sixties seventies, these youngsters of the fifties might well appear a deeply conventional, timid, duffle-jacketed wasp-waisted narrow-based crew, but to Alix, newly emerging from the all-too-personal matrix or patrix of The Heights, they had seemed richly various. Her own college, at first encounter, struck her as somewhat dimly conformist, with long brown corridors and an unexpectedly high proportion of young women apparently wrapped up in the triumphs of yesteryear on the hockey field or in the prefects’ Common Room, but even there she had discovered part of what she was looking for: in the persons of Liz Ablewhite (now Headleand) and Esther Breuer (still Breuer) she had discovered it, and rediscovered it there each time she met them, which was, these days, on average once a fortnight. She had found it in them perhaps more securely than in the friends she had made in other colleges, with whom her relationships had been complicated by sex. She had married one of these complications, for that is what young women did in those days: educated young women married, straight out of college, as she and Liz had done. Liz’s first marriage had lasted all of ten months: Alix’s had lasted slightly longer, and had been terminated not by divorce but by death.

And now she is married to Brian Bowen, towards whom she drives home through the January night. It is a happy marriage. They have one son, Sam. He is eleven. Alix also has a son by her first husband. He is twenty-four, and his name is Nicholas. Liz Headleand suspects that Alix Bowen is in love with Nicholas Manning, and wonders if she knows it. Brian Bowen suspects that Alix Bowen is in love with Nicholas Manning, and wonders if she knows it. Alix Bowen, for her part, has strong suspicions about Liz’s relationship with her three stepsons, but considers her own feelings for Nicholas entirely natural. Esther Breuer is not much interested in the distinction between the natural and the unnatural. Both Alix and Liz are of the opinion that Esther’s relationship with her niece, with whom she shares her flat, is very odd indeed, but it is not to their advantage to discuss this with one another, or with Esther herself, and they never mention it.

When Alix arrived home in Wandsworth, she found Brian and Sam sitting comfortably in front of the television on the ancient sofa with their socked and shoeless feet up watching a Len Deighton movie. She told Sam it was time he was in bed, but without conviction. She sat down with them. Brian told her that Esther had phoned and wanted her to ring back. Alix said it is too late. She started to watch the movie.

In the morning Alix was about to apply herself to a file of Home Office statistics when the phone rang. It was Esther, with the news that their friend Liz had rung her the night before to tell her that she and Charles were getting divorced, and that Charles intended to marry Henrietta Latchett. I thought something was going on, said Esther, and it appears I was right. Good God, said Alix. I had absolutely no idea, said Alix, however did you guess? I saw Charles and Henrietta at a Private View in the National Portrait Gallery, said Esther. Last month. That’s no evidence, said Alix. Well, you know how fond Charles is of painting, said Esther. And evidence or not, I was right, said Esther. Good God, said Alix, what a surprise. She tried to ring you but you weren’t in, said Esther. Well, I don’t know what to say, said Alix, I thought they’d stuck it out so long they’d stay stuck, didn’t you? I mean to say, Charles is an absolute prick, but he’s been a prick for twenty years, why divorce him now?

Esther pointed out that Charles was the one who wanted the divorce.

‘To marry Henrietta?’ asked Alix, in a tone of incredulity. ‘How could he? I mean, he may be a prick, but he’s not an absolute fool.’

And they continued to discuss the personality of Lady Henrietta, or rather her apparent lack of personality, for some time, until Alix, almost as an afterthought, got round to enquiring how Liz was taking it. ‘She sounded fine to me,’ said Esther. ‘Well, of course, she would be,’ said Alix. ‘But why didn’t she tell us earlier?’

‘Apparently she didn’t know earlier. He sprang it on her.’

‘Good God. What a bastard. I’d better give her a ring, I suppose.’

‘I asked her to supper on Friday. Can you make it?’

‘Of course,’ said Alix. ‘I’ll see you then.’

Esther, having thus fulfilled her obligations to her friends, forgot them both instantly, and returned her attention to a volume called The Vegetation of Medieval Europe and a German monograph on Sodoma; works which she was reading and annotating by her own interleaved system, a system which had evolved from her inability to concentrate fully on any one topic for more than ten minutes. It had thrown up some very challenging cross references in its time, and she was at the moment pursuing a connection between the nature of quattrocento pigmentation, and lichenology as a method of dating the antiquity of landscape: a gratifyingly pointless and therefore pure pursuit, which enabled her mind to wander in the direction of Italy and to hover about the abstraction of a particular shade of green-blue which she had noted in many a painted Italian scene as well as in the lichens of ancient English woodland. A pale, delicate, hard, metallic, heavenly, shocking, suggestive green-blue. It tinted dry artistic Italian cypress trees and the undersides of vine leaves, it lived on the damp bark of English oaks and thorns. It expressed both distance and presence: it was both of the background and of the sharpest proximity. An enigmatic colour, speaking of metaphysical correspondences. Signifying nothing but the search for itself. But an essential shade. Italian farmers claimed that some of its modern manifestations were inspired by pesticide, but pesticide would not account for the hue of those ravishing little sprigged seaweed trees on the Tuscan hillsides in the frescoes at Monte Oliveto. Sodoma and Signorelli. Badgers and magpies featured also in those frescoes, and frequented the hillsides to this day. So that vegetable blue also must then as now have had a natural home? Esther Breuer made a note to order Oxenholme’s monograph on Signorelli, and read on, waiting for some little current to leap from one open page to the other, from one lobe of the brain to the other, and to ignite a new twig of meaning, to fill a small new cell of the storehouse of her erudition. She was content with twigs and cells, or so it seemed. Sometimes, when accused of eccentricity or indeed perversity of vision, she would claim that all knowledge must always be omnipresent in all things, and that one could startle oneself into seeing the whole by tweaking unexpectedly at a surprised corner of the great mantle. At other times she conceded that her interests were pointless but harmless. I am not ambitious, I do not seek answers to large questions, she would say. This would baffle her friends and her students who had the impression that she was engaged in some vas if imprecise enterprise. No, I prefer precision, Esther would say. They did not know how to take it.

Jane Austen recommended three or four families in the Country Village as the thing to work on when planning a novel. Esther Breuer might well have been expected to approve this advice, with its implication that depth rather than breadth is of importance, and intimate knowledge of a corner more valuable than a sketchy acquaintance with the globe. In fact, perversely, Esther Breuer disliked the only Jane Austen novel she had ever read (which was, perversely, Sense and Sensibility) and frequently boasts of her inability to tackle the others. ‘Too English for me,’ she will sometimes add, in her impeccably English middle-class intellectual’s voice.

Esther, Liz and Alix, who in Jane Austen’s day would never have met at all, met in Cambridge in 1952. Just before Christmas, when they were up for interview from their respective schools. Alix was applying to read English Literature, Liz to read Natural Sciences (with a view to medicine) and Esther to read Modern Languages. This should have safely prevented any rapport between them, but did not. There were, it is true, many awkwardnesses in their first communications, for none of them was much used to speaking to strangers, but this lack of practice was balanced by a strong desire on the part of all three of them to enter upon a new life in which speaking to strangers was possible. Otherwise, each had separately recognized, the future was circumscribed. Somehow, haltingly, over dinner in Hall (chicken, leeks and tinned spaghetti, a mixture delicious to each after years of post-war whale meat and school meals) they lurched into conversation, having found themselves for no good reason sitting together: Liz and Alix discovered that both came from Yorkshire, and that neither played lacrosse, nor had ever seen it being played, and Esther joined the discussion by volunteering that she had herself managed to avoid playing netball for the past three years on the grounds that she was too small. ‘I said I was unfairly handicapped, and they let me do extra Latin instead,’ she said. The fact that both Liz and Alix seemed to accept that extra Latin might be preferable to netball indicated that further interchange might be possible, and they continued to talk, through the fruit tart and custard, of the nature of intellectual and physical education, of matter and spirit, of Descartes (brought up by Esther), of T. S. Eliot (brought up by Alix) and of schizophrenia (brought up by Liz). The matter was abstract, for none of them knew anything other than abstractions, and the tone lofty. It was what they had expected of University, but had not hoped so soon to find. Esther, at the end of the meal, expressed her satisfaction with her new companions by inviting them to go with her to visit a friend already attending the college, an Old Girl of her school. They accepted with alacrity the prospect of a glimpse of the world inside, and all three of them went along dark portrait-hung corridors and up panelled staircases to the room of one Flora Piercy, a second year History student of considerable sophistication, who offered them a glass of wine. Had they known how rare such a commodity was in a woman’s college at that date, they might have been even more astonished, but in a sense, looking round Flora’s room, with its bright scatter cushions and Picasso prints and posters for plays at the ADC, with its invitations on the mantelpiece, with its gas fire and clutter of old shoes, with its romantic piles of what looked like lecture notes and essays, with its candle in a pewter stick and its wilting rose in a vase, they were beyond astonishment. The glass of wine went quickly to each head, for Alix’s family was teetotal, and Liz’s alcohol consumption to that date comprised perhaps three glasses of brown sherry and one (celebrating her A levels with her teacher) of Liebfraumilch: Esther seemed better connected with drink as with friends, but even she became confiding under the mild influence. They shared their dreams and aspirations, encouraged by the benevolent, admonitory, tutelary spirit of ample broad-faced Flora. ‘I would like,’ said Liz Ablewhite, after midnight, staring into the white flaming chalky cracked pitted flaring columns of the gas fire, ‘to make sense of things. To understand.’ By things, she meant herself. Or she thought she meant herself. ‘I would like,’ said Alix, ‘to change things.’ By things, she did not mean herself. Or thought she did not mean herself. ‘You reach too high,’ said Esther. ‘I wish to acquire interesting information. That is all.’

Liz, at that time, was pale and fair and thin, a colourless creature, unmade-up, drooping and slightly stooping, ill-complexioned, cardiganed, dull, yet glowing with a greenish pallor that compelled attention. Alix was mousy, square faced, healthy of complexion, and, even then, extraordinarily pleasant of expression, with a pleasantness that was at times radiant, and almost always irrefutable: she was wearing, as girls who had them did for their Oxbridge interviews in those days, a two-piece middle-aged suit of an oatmeal mix, with square shoulders and a straight skirt. Esther was small, neat, brown of skin, smooth, tidy, even (almost) elegant, yet somehow at the same time pugnacious of aspect, subversive, aggressive, commanding, Napoleonic of manner. She was wearing a severe school uniform, olive green, from an expensive private school. It looked ironic, satiric, suggestive on her small frame.

Flora Piercy was wearing black velvet trousers, and a large white cable-knit sweater. Her eyelids were painted blue with a blue greasy paste called eye-shadow. Alix bought some the next day, on her free half day in Cambridge before she took the Bletchley route to her Oxford interview (for she was a clever girl, Alix) – but she never dared to apply it, save in the privacy of her own room, until she went to Cambridge herself as a bona fide student the following autumn.

Liz, Alix and Esther all obtained places at the college of their choice, in Cambridge, and there were reunited, to gossip there and elsewhere over subsequent decades of their fortuitous friendship. They lost touch for some time with Flora, their first presiding deity, but even she was to reappear in another context, another life.

Liz Ablewhite was offered, and graciously accepted, the Alethea Ward Scholarship in Natural Sciences (an annual college award specifically designated by Dr Ward, 1853–1935, for female students of medicine from the County of Yorkshire, her own home county), the goal towards which her mother had been directing her for the past ten years. Great Expectations. Is there anything more peculiar, more idiosyncratic, more circumscribed in these expectations than in those of Pip, or of Dickens himself, towards being a gentleman? In the 1950s, one of the surest ways forward for an intellectual young woman from the provinces, for a socially disadvantaged young woman from the provinces, was through Oxford, through Cambridge. Not through Manchester, or Leeds, or Durham, or Bristol: but through Oxford or Cambridge. Dr Alethea Ward had known this, and thus had left her money, some of which eventually Liz Ablewhite had inherited. Rita Ablewhite knew this, though how she knew it remained, to Liz, a mystery which she did not think, did not care to question. As Pip cared not to question too closely the sources of his own endowment. Between them, the deceased Dr Alethea Ward and the surviving Rita Ablewhite directed Liz Ablewhite towards Cambridge, and Liz in her turn handed the same knowledge on to her stepsons and her daughters.

Alix was offered places at both colleges of her choice. In fact, she was offered a better deal (let us not go into too many historic technicalities) in Oxford, but she chose Cambridge because of Flora Piercy’s eye-shadow, and because of Dr Leavis. At Cambridge she met her first husband, Sebastian Manning, who introduced her to a world in which socialism, far from being ridiculous, was natural, chic, colourful, confident, artistic: Sebastian’s parents were artists of some repute, one a painter, the other a potter, and they did not think much of the austerities of Dr Leavis. Bloomsbury and St Ives were more their style. Now Sebastian is dead, long dead, and Alix is married to Brian Bowen, son of a saw polisher, grandson of a furnaceman, and often sits with him on an old settee in her stockinged feet. Brian Bowen admires Dr Leavis, with some respectful reservations.

Esther was also offered places at both universities, and chose Cambridge because it offered her a scholarship, and because her brother had been at King’s, and because she heard an owl hoot thrice in the college garden when she retired to her narrow bed after the glass of wine with Flora Piercy. This last explanation for her choice is the one she most frequently proffered. In Cambridge she quickly established herself as a cult figure of mysterious portent: she claimed to be in love with her brother, whom nobody had ever seen, and went in for gnomic utterances and baroque clutter. Now she lives in a small flat in Ladbroke Grove, with a young woman she says is her niece. She sits in her bed-sitting-room-study reading books. Her walls are painted bright red. Not Pompeian red, as she sometimes points out: it is less blue, slightly more flame, more orange coloured. She is not sure whether it could accurately be described as Venetian red. She is still surrounded by baroque clutter.

These three women, it will readily and perhaps with some irritation be perceived, were amongst the crème de la crème of their generation. Illustrious educational institutions not merely offered them places, but also attempted to entice them. Their initial meeting at dinner in Hall was not quite accidental: the nature of the placement was such that strong scholarship candidates were more likely than not to find themselves sitting together. They did not, of course, know this at the time.

Narratives, in the past, related the adventures of the famous and the wealthy. Kings, queens, emperors, warlords. In The Tale of Genji, which has a claim to be considered the world’s first novel, an emperor weeps for lost love in the opening pages. (Do pages open, in a Japanese novel? Probably not.) In Jane Austen, to come nearer home, the protagonists are not, it is true, titled, but they are privileged. By youth, by wit, by beauty, and sometimes by wealth. The Princesses of their Country Villages.

Liz, Alix and Esther were not princesses. They were not beautiful, they were not rich. But they were young, and they had considerable wit. Their fate should, therefore, be in some sense at least exemplary: opportunity was certainly offered to them, they had choices, at eighteen the world opened for them and displayed its riches, the brave new world of Welfare State and County Scholarships, of equality for women, they were the élite, the chosen, the garlanded of the great social dream. Adventure and possibility lay before them, as they had not lain before Liz’s sister Shirley, who married at nineteen and stayed on in Northam, or before Dora Sutcliffe who left school at fifteen and sold sweets in Woolworth’s until she married Shirley’s husband’s brother Steve.

Brian Bowen’s sister Barbara went to Australia and married a building contractor, but that is another story. Brian himself, had he not done his National Service, would, arguably, still be working at Pitts and Harley and might have continued to work there until 1981 when this ancient, well-established firm closed, with the loss of six hundred jobs. But that is another part of this story, and not to be pursued here, for Brian is not a woman and reflections on his prospects or lack of prospects in 1952 would at this juncture muddy the narrative tendency. Forget I mentioned him. Let us return to Liz, Alix and Esther.

Liz, Alix and Esther were reunited in Cambridge in the autumn of 1953. They had spend their ‘year off’ in highly dissimilar circumstances. Esther paid her first visit to Italy, where she spent three months at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, learned some Italian, drank a great deal of wine, took up with a middle-aged American art historian and began to look at paintings. Alix spent three months working as an au pair girl – working very hard, for no pay – in a suburb of Paris, bored out of her mind most of the time, but strangely, surprisingly consoled by the youngest member of the large family, a baby, which, unlike its larger siblings, seemed to like her. Alix, then as ever, liked anybody who liked her. She spent her rare afternoons off visiting the sights of Paris, or lying in the Luxembourg Gardens alone, reading Dostoevsky and Sartre and Camus, and sending out contradictory messages to idle young men who wondered if it would be worth trying to pick her up.

Liz stayed at home in Northam, studying. Her mother (she knew without asking, there was never any possibility of her asking) expected her to stay at home. Liz had a calendar and she crossed off the days in black ink. She read Victorian novels and studied textbooks of anatomy. She started to read Freud (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Totem and Taboo), without understanding, yet without misunderstanding. She tried to learn the Book of Job by heart, but never got safely past the end of the second chapter; the first two chapters were on the dull side, overloaded with yoke of oxen and she-asses, with Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, Job’s comforters. Liz wanted to get on to the exciting bits, in which Job demanded why light was given to him that was in misery, and life to the bitter in soul: in which Job desired to argue with his God: in which the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: but she knew it would be cheating to miss out the she-asses and skip to the livelier parts, so she plodded dully on with the dull narrative. Obsessional behaviour: she determined that one day she would find an explanation for it, and, meanwhile, pursued it.

Esther sent Liz a postcard, from Perugia. Liz put it on her bedroom mantelpiece, and touched it, every morning on rising, and every night as she went to bed. Esther sent a card to Alix, too, but Alix’s mother forwarded it accidentally-on-purpose to the wrong address possibly because she did not care for a rather elaborate allusion to Lacrima Christi in the text, nor for the brightly coloured shiny modern Madonna which the card portrayed. Alix’s mother, broad-minded though she was, did not approve of Catholicism, and was hardly to know that Esther was Jewish.

It would be wrong to give the impression that Liz, Alix and Esther fell into one another’s arms with cries of delight when they met again that October, or to suggest that they proved thereafter inseparable. But they were, nevertheless, pleased to rediscover one another, and sat up late on their first evening in Esther’s room, which had already begun to put out hints of its later decorative eccentricities. They talked of their summer adventures, of their hopes for the future, but mostly of their own provenance. Liz attempted her first sketch of her mother, her first outline for the outside world of the domestic ghost with which she had lived so long: Alix spoke of her relief at escaping from the small boarding school world in which her parents and her contemporaries all knew one another far too well: Esther conjured up visions of both deprivation and splendour in her own past. They did not know then, were not to know for many years, were never fully to understand what it was that held them together – a sense of being on the margins of English life, perhaps, a sense of being outsiders, looking in from a cold street through a lighted window into a warm lit room that later might prove to be their own? Removed from the mainstream by a mad mother, by a deviant ideology, by refugee status and the war-sickness of Middle Europe? None of this would have meant anything to them, then, as they drank their Nescafé, which in those days came not in granules in jars but in powder in tins with brown, cream and white labels: tins which cost 2s.6d. each. They thought they found one another interesting. And so they became friends.

They also made other friends, of course, both inside and outside their own college. Liz, like a pale convent girl too long mewed up, went wild in her first year, as she discovered the world of parties she had hitherto known only by reading and by hearsay: in those days, such was the imbalance between the sexes, women were much in demand as status symbols, as sleeping partners, as lovers, as party ballast, and Liz went out a great deal, her appearance improving dramatically as she did so. She had little money for clothes, but that did not matter; it did not even matter, much, to her, though sometimes she wished she had more than two dresses, one pink, one grey. She hung herself around with cheap earrings and necklaces and bangles. Her stockings were always laddered. She was much invited. Men accosted her on bridges, in lectures, in bookshops. She tried them all. But she never disobeyed the rules by spending a night, illicitly, out of college. Like Cinderella, she returned at midnight. In the mornings, in the long vacations, she worked.

In her second year, she met Edgar Lintot. He was a conspicuous high-profiled figure, in those days, a medical student and a man of the theatre, famed for his Footlights appearances and his impromptu wit. Liz also dabbled with acting, and played several roles rather well – an inventive Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a curiously haunting, poignant Bellario in Philaster, directed by Edgar. Wounded loyalty and dignified pathos were her line on stage, although off-stage she grew increasingly self-assertive. Her social world, in Cambridge, was largely theatrical. After midnight, in college, she would discuss it with Alix and Esther.

Alix’s social world was somewhat different. Having been to a coeducational school, she did not find men a novelty, and in theory ought to have been able to discriminate better than Liz (who endured some fairly dreadful experimental evenings in her search for entertainment), but her natural kindness made it almost impossible for her to refuse any overture, however offensive, however louche. A mixture of gratitude and pity held her captive through many a long, polite, sad, dull declaration of admiration, and kept her smiling through many an impolite drunken assault on her brassière straps. ‘What will become of me?’ she would sometimes ask Liz and Esther, in mock-alarm.