Free A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble Page A

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 Brian is way, way out of date. He is so far out of date that sometimes he thinks the revolution may, in its revolving, turn again to his own aged and honourable position.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,