Free A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble

Bakewell blames him for lack of confidence. ‘You’ve got to think positive,’ Jim is—or was—fond of saying.
    Cliff thinks that is all beside the point. Figures are what count, not faith.
    His relationship with Jim deteriorates, almost as dramatically as the non-contractual relationship between Jim’s wife Yvonne and Cliff’s wife Shirley has done. These two women cannot stand one another. The origins of their mutual dislike are lost in history, though there is some remembered legend about a rejected piece of lemon meringue pie. It is known that Yvonne thinks Shirley gets ‘above herself’, ‘thinks a lot of herself’, ‘thinks she’s too good for this world’. ‘Who does she think she is?’ is the phrase that springs most frequently to Yvonne’s lips, when speaking of Shirley. Shirley, for her part, cannot forget or forgive a remark Yvonne once made about Shirley’s mother and the virtual seclusion in which Shirley’s mother chose to live. Cliff and Jim, for years, attempted to mediate, and then to keep the women apart, but rancour persisted, and has now flooded into their own friendship. ‘What did I tell you?’ is now Yvonne’s refrain.
    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