Free A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble Page B

outcasts. Yes, he could see clearly an Alix who would crouch by a fire warming her hands on a mug of soup, her fingers dirty, her grey hair wild, her eyes glittering, her mind slowly filling with belief, as her body took on the posture of a witch. She would knit little Peace Emblems and tie them fluttering to the barbed wire: she would murmur incantations in ghostly gay company. It was perfectly plausible, this version of Alix, in a way it was what she had been bred to be, by her school, by her parents, by generations of radical intellectual nonconformists. She had been bred to be a protestor, a marcher, a martyr, a woman of faith. She had met her first husband, who had died long before Brian met her, on a protest march. In the face of such destiny, the details of conviction, of opinion, did not matter: it was the posture of protest that gave one shape, belief, faith. If one is born and bred to a role of outcast protestor, then one must adopt it, in order to conform.
    But Alix had not adopted it. Reason had been too strong for her; reason followed, fatally, by doubt. She had become deviant. And she had detached herself from politics, in disillusion; she had taken up psychotics and long country walks instead.
    Well, she had not quite detached herself from politics. She cannot wean herself away altogether. She cannot help looking for a way forward, for a new consensus that will unite her and Brian and Perry Blinkhorn and Otto Werner and their absent friend Stephen Cox, Stephen, the most extreme of all. She has been reading a book called
How Britain Votes
, which describes the emergence of a new semi-professional class of Perry Blinkhorns and catering manageresses and nursery schoolteachers and social workers, which suggests that higher education in practice as well as in theory leads to a liberalization of attitude on such matters as capital punishment. Clutching at straws, at men of straw. For does not everything else she reads suggest that we are moving towards a new intolerance, a new negation of ‘progress’, a culture where education is openly used not to liberalize and unite, but to segregate and divide?
    Alix and Brian agree to differ, for their hearts are united. They may differ about means, but their vision of a just society is the same. Their marriage has been through some rough times lately, but they seem to have survived them. Unlike some of the couples in this narrative, they do not seem at the moment to be heading for marital disaster.
    Shirley Harper has no interest in politics at all. At the last election, she did not even vote. Cliff Harper, small businessman, small employer and member of the petty bourgeoisie, is, as
How Britain Votes
would predict, of the die-hard right-wing. He is slightly acquainted, through Shirley’s sister Liz, through his sister-in-law Dora, with Brian and Alix, but they do not, cannot like one another or trust one another. Alix, who extends sympathy and interest to criminals and murderers, finds it very hard to listen with patience to the views of a Cliff Harper. This is one of her more serious limitations, a limitation of which she is, seriously, unaware.
    Alix enjoys danger, but Brian, like Cliff, does not. Brian does not need it, does not see the point of it, wishes that people could get along without it. He gets impatient when rescue teams are called out in appalling conditions by parties of stranded walkers in the Lake District. He secretly sympathizes with judges who are held up to derision for saying that young girls in mini-skirts shouldn’t ask for trouble by hitching lifts from strangers at midnight. Brian cannot see why people have to climb Everest or cross the Atlantic single-handed in coracles. He cannot see why his friend Stephen Cox has gone off to Democratic Kampuchea when he could have stayed at home writing novels in his bachelor flat in Primrose Hill. And as for Charles Headleand’s plans—well, Brian thinks they are ridiculous, embarrassingly ridiculous. But