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