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