A Natural Curiosity (30 page)

‘And Shirley, on her way, with her mysterious lover,’ says Esther.

‘Oh God, don’t remind me of Shirley,’ says Liz. ‘But seriously, Est, are you ever thinking of coming back? It’s not so bad here, you know. Or not for people like us.’

Esther hesitates. Shall she speak, shall she be silent? Where do her loyalties now lie? She does not know. Is it worth agreeing to marry Robert Oxenholme, just for the fun of shocking Liz out of her wits?

‘Why don’t you come and see me, Liz,’ she retaliates. ‘You and Alix, come out and see me. I’m sure you could find a pretext. If you need one. Think about it.’

‘All right,’ agrees Liz. As she puts down the phone, she suddenly feels not whimsically but deeply sad, alone and tired and old and sad. What next, she asks herself, and what is the point of what next? It is true that she misses Esther and Alix, and the irregularly regular little suppers that they used to share. She doesn’t feel up to making any new friends. Why bother? She can hardly believe that Shirley has acquired a new man. Liz cannot imagine acquiring or wanting to acquire one. She had been happy, with Esther and Alix, with her growing children and stepchildren, with her share of Charles, and now they have all gone. Liz sits in her familiar armchair, gazing at her little inlaid table, at its fragile burden of scented jonquils in a glass vase, at a heap of unread new novels and a life of Melanie Klein and a book of photo-reportage about the Philippines. Her curiosity is at a low ebb. It occurs to her that not only may she die before she satisfies it, but that she may also lose it before she dies. Curiosity has kept her alive. What if she were to lose it now? She has not the energy to move. She is bored, lifeless. Her mind wanders to Shirley. Ought she to ring Steve and Dora Harper, ought she to try to contact Celia in Oxford, or Barry in Newcastle, or Bob in Australia, ought she to speak to Clive Enderby? She yawns. Paris. Paris and Shirley. The two do not go together. Paris. She remembers a wild weekend there with Charles, years and years ago, nearly thirty years ago, just before Sally was born . . . She nods, her eyes close, she dozes.

Alix, on her monthly visit to report to Paul Whitmore, thinks of Liz, and of Shirley, who will now be on her way home, and of Esther, and of the nature of curiosity, and of the nature of love. Sexual love, maternal love, sisterly love, friendship. She thinks of Angela Whitmore, and the dreadful dogs. Does Angela ‘love’ those dogs? Does Liz ‘love’ her tabby cat, or does she merely
pretend
to love her tabby cat? And Paul Whitmore, in Porston Prison, whom does he love, whom can he now love?

Alix is afraid that Paul Whitmore ‘loves’ her, Alix Bowen. Oh, not particularly, but just because she is there, because she is there and his mother is not. Can she possibly love Paul Whitmore? Is this what is asked of her?

Alix had received that morning a letter from her friend and admirer, from her husband’s close friend, Otto Werner. A year ‘or two ago she had fancied herself ‘in love’ with Otto, and he had declared himself to be ‘in love’ with her. They had done nothing about it, and Otto had gone off with his children and his wife Caroline to take up a post in Washington. Love, unstimulated, unsustained, had dwindled and faded. Could it be recovered, if Otto were to return and claim her? No, no, that was all over. His letter had been careful, courteous, rueful. He had written of American politics, of the Governor of Massachusetts’s Employment and Training Choices Programme, of Workfare, of Brian’s view that Britain was now a poor colony of the USA, a missile pad, a nuclear dump. He had not written of matters of the heart. He never did, he did not know how to. But he had signed himself ‘Yours for ever, dearest Alix, your Otto’. Well, that would do., Nothing that Brian could not see, nothing that Brian could object to. A road not taken. An open letter.

Beaver’s love letters were an extraordinary collection. Perversely, he seemed to have kept the most disagreeable, abusive ones—there must surely once have been some more tender notes, somewhere, from someone? Money featured in them frequently. Beaver had been a great borrower, and his women sometimes seemed to want their money back, as well as their hearts and minds. ‘You owe me eleven thousand pounds,’ one of them had written, in firm italic script, ‘and a copy of
Paradise Lost
, and I think you may have got my translation of the
Divine Comedy
, to say nothing of four years of my life and Geoffrey’s cashmere scarf.’ Another had complained, more plangently, in stuttering typescript, ‘How could you, H. B., after all I did for you in Birmingham? I really thought you meant to pay it back. Please, please, dear heart, I need that two hundred quid
now
, surely you could borrow it off Bertha? Or Sonya, if she’s
so
devoted to you? Two hundred was all I had. My fond heart gave all. Give back to one who loved not wisely but too well. Please, try to get it over by Friday, before Jack gets home.’

Alix enjoyed reading these old letters, rustling of dead romance and forgotten betrayals. But she was also disturbed by them. How
upsetting
love affairs were. Why did people so
enjoy
being miserable? She herself had always preferred (she now could clearly see) safe men, undangerous men. She had not been attracted to the bastards and Beavers and Bohemians of this world. Her first husband Sebastian had been a happy man, cheerful, good-natured optimist, confident, friendly. He never had time to turn into anything worse. He had died too young to rot, to become a rotter. Brian was a good man, a strong man, a man who would never borrow a penny off anyone, a man who would lend his last fiver to a stranger. A man of honour. And Otto too was a good man, an honourable man, who had resisted the temptation of Alix’s blue eyes, who had honourably removed himself from her mature Siren attractions, and taken himself off to the fleshpots of Reaganland. All honourable men. Is there something
wrong
with me, pondered Alix, that I only get off with honourable men, that only honourable men fancy me? Am I
afraid
of the bastard streak?

It’s true that she quite enjoyed it, at a safe remove, in Beaver.

Love. Eros. Agape. The destroying angel. Angela Whitmore had not loved Paul Whitmore, and as a result he had killed several innocent strangers.

Alix’s memory flicked, suddenly, to her one-time history teacher, Miss Fawcett. Miss Fawcett had preached love, in a curious and haunting manner, a manner which her pupils had found excessive and ridiculous. Miss Fawcett had—almost—been a figure of fun. She had been a representative eccentric, an eccentric of the kind that was often to be found in private boarding schools and may still, for all Alix knew, linger on there—a fierce, lonely, exalted spinster, whose life seemed to her young charges to exist on the edge of unbearable privation. Although the school was coeducational, and in theory at least espoused the equality and natural communion of the sexes, Miss Fawcett managed to bring to it a strange intensity of chosen virginity, an old-fashioned ardour.

Her room had been like a cell, an anchorite’s cell. It was on the top corridor of School House, where in addition to her other duties she supervised the night-time ramblings of the fifth and sixth form girls. Alix, who was not a boarder, had been invited up there for tea, for a talking-to, a dressing-down, a putting-right. This was when Alix was in the upper fifth, and had taken up the cause of communism, partly to annoy her classmates.

‘Sit down, Alix,’ Miss Fawcett had said, nervously, severely.

And Alix sat, and looked around her, at the tall shiny cream-painted bare walls, at the narrow bed with its maroon woven bedspread and its little folding tartan rug, at the cheap wardrobe with cheap wood beading round its door, at the ill-fitting limp curtains, at the desk-bureau, at the bookcase. Nothing in the room matched, nothing fitted, everything had a temporary, impermanent, rickety look, and the room—carved out, partitioned out of a much larger room—was too high for its floor space, it was high and thin, with a high window, above eye level, through which one could never commune with anything but the sky. No photographs, no ornaments, no personal effects disturbed the room’s austerity.

Miss Fawcett offered Alix a cup of tea, and a biscuit. She had a gas ring and kettle in the hearth, and a tin of biscuits on the table at her elbow. The biscuit was ceremonial. Alix nibbled it, as slowly as she could, as Miss Fawcett told her that she was distressed to hear Alix defending the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin to her classmates. ‘You’re an intelligent girl, Alix,’ she said, her grey face intent, quizzical, her corkscrew curls bobbing as she nodded in emphasis, an intelligent girl, I’m sure you are just trying out ideas, but these matters are too serious to play with, you know, too serious to make games of.’

‘I’m not making games,’ said Alix. ‘I’m interested in communism. I think it’s a good idea.’

‘What is it that attracts you to it?’ asked Miss Fawcett, sipping her pale tea.

And Alix had spoken of equality, of sharing, or her dislike of divisions of wealth and class. Her ideas were muddled, halfbaked, she had no hope of defending them, she was acutely uncomfortable during this interrogation, for Miss Fawcett was a historian, she knew about the Soviet Union and the Second World War and the Treaty of Yalta and the show trials of the thirties and the death of Trotsky. She knew the god that failed. Alix knew next to nothing about any of this.

‘Alix,’ said Miss Fawcett, ‘you speak of equality. But do you think that equality can be achieved by economic means, by redistribution, by taking from the rich and giving to the poor?’

‘Well, yes, sort of,’ said Alix.

‘And are we born equal? Are we born to expect equality? Have we any natural right to equality?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Alix, stubbornly.

‘There is only one sense in which we are equal,’ said Miss Fawcett.

‘I know what you are trying to get me to say,’ said Alix. ‘That we are all equal in the eyes of God.’

Miss Fawcett nodded.

‘But I’m afraid that doesn’t really
mean
anything to me,’ said Alix. Apologetically, not aggressively. ‘I can’t quite see what it
means
.’

But even as she said this, she could feel emanating from the dim bunched thin knitted figure of Miss Fawcett a wave of illumination, or conviction, that made the whole room surge and heave and flutter with light—or was it merely a distant ray of sun breaking through the high window, the high blind window?

‘Alix,’ said Miss Fawcett, ‘we are all equal in the eyes of God because we are all loved by God. And our task on this earth is to emulate that love, by loving all. And if we achieve this, we achieve freedom, equality, brotherhood, sisterhood. Love is the answer. The highest love.’

Alix was deeply struck by this. It made good sense to her.

‘But Miss Fawcett,’ she said, ‘how can you love everyone? Do
you
love everyone?’ Her temerity amazed her, but Miss Fawcett was not amazed.

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I try. I fail, but I try. You see, in my position’—and she paused, deliberately, and looked around her small room, at her sparse possessions—‘it is easy to try.’ Alix sat on the edge of her semi-hard institution chair, rigid with attention. Miss Fawcett was about to offer the key to the universe. ‘Yes,’ Miss Fawcett continued, ‘for me, I make myself try. And occasionally, I succeed. And then you are all irradiated. All equally.’

She smiled serenely, severely.

‘All?’ Alix insisted.

‘Yes, all.’ Miss Fawcett sighed. ‘You see, Alix, at my age, in my position—I see people come and go, you young people, you arrive at the age of eleven, twelve, thirteen, and pass through this school, and then on into the world, and another class comes, another year . . . why should I discriminate? Your faces are not individual faces, you are not girls and boys to me, as you are to yourselves, you are manifestations, waves, waves upon waves . . . I see the waves break on the shore. All equal, all equally. Yes,’ Miss Fawcett smiled, forbiddingly, privately, mystically, ‘I love all equally.’

Alix was silenced. Cautiously, she put her cup and saucer down in the hearth, on the crazed green tiles.

‘My love, you see,’ said Miss Fawcett, patiently, ‘like the love of God, can make amends. If I am able to love the plain as well as the beautiful, the stupid as well as the clever, the mean as well as the good. It is love that redeems.’

Little motes of dust turned in the shaft of sunlight.

‘So,’ said Miss Fawcett, with an air of inexorable logic, ‘you see that communism is not the answer. Love is the answer.’

‘Yes,’ said Alix. ‘I see.’

‘I don’t suppose for a moment that you
do
see,’ said Miss Fawcett, a little more briskly, ‘you are far too young. But I thought I ought to speak to you just the same?’

‘Thank you, Miss Fawcett,’ said Alix, politely.

‘You may go back to prep now,’ said Miss Fawcett.

Alix rose to her feet and stood there for a moment, looking down at her scuffed brown sandals, her grey knee socks. She wanted to ask if Miss Fawcett needed to be loved by anyone else, or if she was content to do all the loving herself, but the question seemed impertinent—and anyway, she worked the answer out for herself as she slopped her way down the shallow stone stairs. Silly question, the answer was obvious, of course Miss Fawcett didn’t need anyone to love her, because God loved her. And it was God’s love of her that made her able to love everybody else, everybody in the world, equally, Alix Bowen, Tim Bowlby, Betty Sykes, Pinky Rowson, Kate Josephs, Joseph Stalin, Arthur Koestler, the lot, all of them, equally, all . . . 

Alix, aged fifteen, puzzled at the way a system can provide its own answers,
none of which need have any relation at all to any outside system
, none of which could ever be checked. So religion had survived, so ideologies survived, in blatant defiance of
how things are
. Shuffling, then skipping, then running down a corridor (
Don’t run, Bowen
, echoing vainly after her) and out, and across the autumnal lawn and down the conker avenue and home . . . and now, in her fifties, on her way to prison, Miss Fawcett (who had died the year before as sparsely as she had lived, in an old people’s home) rose again to confront Alix Bowen, with that riddle, that old chestnut, of universal love.
L’amor, che muove il sol e l’altre stelle
 . . . Was it because of Miss Fawcett that she felt compelled to try to love Paul Whitmore? To
make
him lovable? To make
him
lovable?