A Natural Curiosity (8 page)

Jim resigns as fellow-director, tries to get his money out. There is no money. There is talk of liquidation of assets, of consulting an insolvency practitioner. Jim argues (rightly) that insolvency practitioners come very expensive and that the company’s accounts will not rise to one. Cliff muddles on. He cannot sleep, he cannot eat, he loses weight. He worries, secretly, about his health, and furtively consults medical dictionaries in the Information Centre at the public library. They terrify him, as leaflets on insolvency in that same library terrify Shirley. Things drag on, good money is borrowed and thrown after bad, money leaks and oozes away, staff are laid off, the Customs and Excise query Cliff’s VAT returns, he cannot work out how to deregister.

He does not discuss these matters with Shirley. He has become morose and surly, impossible to live with. He punishes her for his sense of impending failure. He torments her. She wonders if she can stand it much longer. He is a changed man, he is not the man she thought she married. She can see no way out. A kind of dull despair settles in her: this is it, this is the end. But there is no end.

Meanwhile, she cooks Cliff’s breakfast, and cooks his supper: she cleans his house, pays his household bills, washes his clothes, cleans his bath, buys his soap and lavatory paper. The house ticks over, Shirley ticks over, Shirley-and-Cliff tick over. They watch television together, they sleep in the same bed, occasionally they even go out for a meal together.

It all seems a little unreal, but then, the country at large seems a little unreal too. It is hard to tell if it is ticking over or not. Are we bankrupt or are we prosperous? Have we squandered our resources and drained the North Sea gold, or is the economy booming and the balance of payments healthier than it has been for decades? Are our hospitals crumbling and our streets full of litter, or have we triumphantly reduced the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement? Are there nearly four million unemployed with unemployment rising daily, especially in the north, or are the unemployment figures sinking daily, especially in the north? Has spending on the National Health Service since 1979 gone down by 5 per cent, as the Opposition claims, or up by 24 per cent, as the government claims? Each day brings new figures, new analysis, new comment, new interpretations, newly false oppositions of factors that cannot properly be compared: for the nation has fallen in love with statistics, although it cannot decide what they mean. A few eyewitnesses continue to describe what they see, as they travel by tube, walk the streets, wait in bus shelters, queue in doctors’ waiting-rooms, serve on juries, and clutch their wire baskets at the supermarket check-out, but others accuse them of telling atrocity stories, of indulging in a pornography of squalor.

Brian Bowen has learned nothing from the last few years. He stands where he did. He is an unreconstructed socialist. He has not learned doubt. Alix has learned doubt, but not Brian. Brian is less reconstructed than his friend Blinkhorn of Northam City Council, a man of the New Hard Pragmatic Middle Left. He is far less reconstructed than his older and closer friend, Otto Werner, economist, who has left for Washington, as part of the Brain Drain. Brian is way, way out of date. He is so far out of date that sometimes he thinks the revolution may, in its revolving, turn again to his own aged and honourable position. Meanwhile, he organizes evening classes and worries over balance sheets and interviews teachers and sets up courses and seminars, and even finds time to do a little teaching himself. And out there, amongst the people, he fancies he finds some unreconstructed socialists like himself. One of them, a middle-aged catering manageress, is so unreconstructed that she thinks the correct term is ‘unreconstituted’, and firmly declares herself on any suitable occasion to be just that—unreconstituted—proudly, as though she were a wholesome piece of prime beef or fresh fish, not a knitted turkey roll or a soya hamburger.

The truth is that Brian, since coming up to Northam, his home town, has felt happier, less isolated, in his unreconstructed state. He is not, here, driven to extremes of position, as he had been in London. The political atmosphere here seems more decent, more realistic, less febrile and opinionated than the atmosphere in London. This is partly because the left here has more roots, more confidence, more sense of tradition. Northam has a left-wing council and a vast majority of Labour Members of Parliament, so Brian here does not have to feel like a pariah or a crazed dreamer. He does not have to fight every inch of the way, every day, as he did in the Adult Education College in south London that jumped at the chance of making him redundant. True, Northam has a reputation for being extremist, for being of the ‘loony left’, but anybody who lives there knows that this reputation is greatly exaggerated. Northam is a solid provincial town, staggering now from the recession, but not yet on its knees. Perry Blinkhorn and Clive Enderby may not yet be on speaking terms, and may feel culturally condemned to despise one another, but they come from the same stock, they speak with the same accent, they share some of the same hopes, and they have more in common with one another than either have with the yuppies and city slickers and get-rich-quick boys of a south which they distrust. Brian fits in here. He settles back into the familiar city that bore him, and which he struggled so hard to leave.

And Alix, far more uprooted than he, far less a northerner, far less in tune with Northam’s brand of socialism—she does not seem too out of place, too unhappy, either. She has made new friends, she has found herself a job, she keeps up her criminal connections, and she too loves the landscape. She does not miss London as she had feared she might.

Sometimes Brian finds himself remembering (or reconstructing, perhaps?) some remarks made by Alix when there had seemed to be a probability that Brian’s new job might take him not from London to Northam but from London to Gloseley, an unattractive Midlands town famed chiefly for its nuclear missile station and its attendant Peace Women. Alix had said that if they went to Gloseley, she could join the women over their camp-fires. But, Brian had protested, you don’t even think you believe in unilateral disarmament. No, said Alix, I don’t suppose I do, now, but I could become an outcast, and if I became an outcast by joining those women, then I would begin to believe what they believe. That’s how it would go. I would sit by the fire, and that would bring belief.

Fitting in, believing, consensus, outcasts. Yes, he could see clearly an Alix who would crouch by a fire warming her hands on a mug of soup, her fingers dirty, her grey hair wild, her eyes glittering, her mind slowly filling with belief, as her body took on the posture of a witch. She would knit little Peace Emblems and tie them fluttering to the barbed wire: she would murmur incantations in ghostly gay company. It was perfectly plausible, this version of Alix, in a way it was what she had been bred to be, by her school, by her parents, by generations of radical intellectual nonconformists. She had been bred to be a protestor, a marcher, a martyr, a woman of faith. She had met her first husband, who had died long before Brian met her, on a protest march. In the face of such destiny, the details of conviction, of opinion, did not matter: it was the posture of protest that gave one shape, belief, faith. If one is born and bred to a role of outcast protestor, then one must adopt it, in order to conform.

But Alix had not adopted it. Reason had been too strong for her; reason followed, fatally, by doubt. She had become deviant. And she had detached herself from politics, in disillusion; she had taken up psychotics and long country walks instead.

Well, she had not quite detached herself from politics. She cannot wean herself away altogether. She cannot help looking for a way forward, for a new consensus that will unite her and Brian and Perry Blinkhorn and Otto Werner and their absent friend Stephen Cox, Stephen, the most extreme of all. She has been reading a book called
How Britain Votes
, which describes the emergence of a new semi-professional class of Perry Blinkhorns and catering manageresses and nursery schoolteachers and social workers, which suggests that higher education in practice as well as in theory leads to a liberalization of attitude on such matters as capital punishment. Clutching at straws, at men of straw. For does not everything else she reads suggest that we are moving towards a new intolerance, a new negation of ‘progress’, a culture where education is openly used not to liberalize and unite, but to segregate and divide?

Alix and Brian agree to differ, for their hearts are united. They may differ about means, but their vision of a just society is the same. Their marriage has been through some rough times lately, but they seem to have survived them. Unlike some of the couples in this narrative, they do not seem at the moment to be heading for marital disaster.

Shirley Harper has no interest in politics at all. At the last election, she did not even vote. Cliff Harper, small businessman, small employer and member of the petty bourgeoisie, is, as
How Britain Votes
would predict, of the die-hard right-wing. He is slightly acquainted, through Shirley’s sister Liz, through his sister-in-law Dora, with Brian and Alix, but they do not, cannot like one another or trust one another. Alix, who extends sympathy and interest to criminals and murderers, finds it very hard to listen with patience to the views of a Cliff Harper. This is one of her more serious limitations, a limitation of which she is, seriously, unaware.

Alix enjoys danger, but Brian, like Cliff, does not. Brian does not need it, does not see the point of it, wishes that people could get along without it. He gets impatient when rescue teams are called out in appalling conditions by parties of stranded walkers in the Lake District. He secretly sympathizes with judges who are held up to derision for saying that young girls in mini-skirts shouldn’t ask for trouble by hitching lifts from strangers at midnight. Brian cannot see why people have to climb Everest or cross the Atlantic single-handed in coracles. He cannot see why his friend Stephen Cox has gone off to Democratic Kampuchea when he could have stayed at home writing novels in his bachelor flat in Primrose Hill. And as for Charles Headleand’s plans—well, Brian thinks they are ridiculous, embarrassingly ridiculous. But then, he had somewhat harsh views of the generally admired conduct of the long-vanished kidnapped envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite. Why can’t people accept the limitations of the human condition, instead of trying to
show off
all the time? Brian is not a risk-taker. Or so he thinks. He does not admire heroism, would never himself aspire to act heroically. Or so he thinks.

Ancient crimes, ancient victims. Over supper, in St John’s Wood, Alix and Liz Headleand laugh heartily, with abandon, as they recall the scene in the British Museum archaeology exhibition, by the glass coffin where the upper half of Lindow Man sleeps everlastingly. ‘
So
nice,’ says Alix, almost choking over her lentil soup, ‘so absolutely
sweet
, such a—such a
little
boy!’

‘And oh
dear
, that
marvellous
old lady, though I don’t know why I call her old, she wasn’t all
that
much older than us,’ agrees Liz, dabbing her eyes with her rose-sprigged napkin: happy to see Alix, happy to remember the day’s adventures, still amused by the little seven-year-old, grey-uniformed, pink-braided boy who had piped up so sweetly, so piercingly, so unselfconsciously in his treble, gazing at the miraculously preserved, multiply wounded, overslaughtered sacrificial corpse, the corpse of a victim who had been bashed on the head, stabbed in the chest and garrotted, whose throat had been cut, and who had been left to lie for two millennia in a boggy pool. ‘Gosh,’ the little boy had announced, to his schoolmates, to his teacher, to Alix and Liz and two Japanese tourists and the old lady in a felt hat. ‘Gosh, isn’t he lucky, to have ended up here!’

Liz, Alix and the old lady had all smiled: the old lady had spoken up. ‘Not very lucky
up to that point
, young man!’ she had admonished him, pointing to the writings on the wall announcing the probable sequence of events that had led to his death and his body’s recovery. The schoolfriends had laughed, Alix and Liz had laughed, and the little boy himself had smiled broadly, unabashed, his freckled face with its gap tooth and small nose open as a flower, open as a book that all might read, open as innocence. He knew what he meant. And of course, as Alix and Liz agreed over their lentil soup, they knew what he meant too, there
was
something rather wonderful, rather lucky even, about such defiance of time, about Lindow Man’s role as a link and a messenger from the underworld, about such arbitrary, quirkish, museum-venerated fame.

‘I wonder if people would
pay
to be put in museums after their death?’ ponders Alix.

‘Well, the Egyptians did, in a sense,’ says Liz. ‘And the Chinese. And the holy saints of the Catholic Church that hang around under altars in Italy.’

‘The saints didn’t
pay!
says Alix, reprovingly. ‘They were preserved by sanctity.’

‘Sorry,’ says Liz.

Liz and Alix have had a good afternoon. Alix is pleased to have caught up with the exhibition before it closes and wonders if she has not become more conscientious about attending cultural events in London now that she does not live so near them. She has come down on the Rapide Coach and is spending the night with Liz. They have a lot to talk about.

They discuss Bog People in general, the poems of Seamus Heaney, the Bog Man of Buller, P. V. Glob, the excavations of Ian Kettle, P. Whitmore’s interest in corpses and Ancient Britain, and Alix’s notion that the story of Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes should be adapted for television.

‘Why don’t you write it yourself?’ asks Liz.

‘I’m too busy. And anyway, I can’t write.’

‘Get Beaver to write it. It’s his period.’

‘Oh, he’s well past it.’

They discuss Beaver, briefly. Beaver claims to have an exmistress living in elderly seclusion on the shores of Lake Maggiore.