A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  The door opened.

  Paul Whitmore’s mother Angela was unmistakable. She had a hairstyle of arranged carved red solid waves rising from her square brow. Only a professional could achieve such an effect. Alix blinked, stood her ground. Angela was wearing slacks—a word not much used these days, but slacks these were, in Alix’s view. Mauve slacks. And a green large-knit large-stitch jersey over a mauve shirt. A cigarette burned in Angela’s nail-varnished fingers. Alix tried to smile, and succeeded. Angela smiled, professionally.

  ‘Mrs Simpson?’ asked Angela. ‘Come about the two-months bitch?’

  Alix half nodded, half shook her head, and stepped slightly forward. She could see a fine entrance hall behind Angela, polished wood, large bowls of flowers, oak tables, oil paintings. No dogs.

  ‘No,’ said Alix, her foot well over the threshold, ‘I’ve come about Paul.’

  Angela looked away, very quickly, but did not slam the door or summon her hounds. Instead she froze. Her cigarette still burning.

  ‘I’m not talking to you,’ said Angela, eventually. ‘I’ve nothing to say.’

  Alix looked around at the solid furniture. On one of the dark gleaming tables stood a little vase of primroses. She took heart. From the back regions of the house, a dog began to mourn and wail.

  ‘What a lovely house,’ said Alix. The flowers are so lovely.’

  ‘I’m not talking,’ said Angela.

  ‘Lovely primroses,’ said Alix. ‘We haven’t had many yet, this year, over our way.’

  Angela rose to the challenge.

  ‘I don’t do the flowers,’ she said. ‘The Colonel does the flowers.’

  ‘But you do the dogs?’

  ‘Me and Stanley, we do the dogs. And the Colonel. And Dr Everett.’

  Right. Got it, thought Alix.

  ‘But if you haven’t come about the dogs—’ counterattacked Angela. Angela was knocked off guard, unable to change her tack sharply enough, she was still geared for a servile welcome of Mrs Simpson.

  ‘I’d like to see the dogs,’ said Alix.

  ‘The Colonel and Dr Everett are in London this week,’ said Angela.

  ‘But you could show me the dogs,’ said Alix.

  And Angela showed her the dogs. Well, what is bait, what is stupidity? Throw in a lump of poisoned meat, and you are over the wall.

  Alix was appalled by the dogs, but smiled and did not say so. Bull mastiffs, they were, Angela told her, bred by the Colonel and the Doctor. There were cages at the back of the house, outbuildings, stables full of dogs, a warren of servants’ quarters full of dogs, cellars full of dogs. The cellarage of the house, opening on garden level at one side, owing to the steep incline, was so vast and high roofed it could have taken in a row of double-decker buses or housed a legion of the Roman army. Instead, it bred dogs. There was a smell of dog and dog meat and dog shit and disinfectant and damp plaster, an overpowering, nauseating stench. Angela moved on, occasionally smiling as she showed off a squeaking blind litter, a prancing pup, a swollen-teated bitch, a slavering sabre-toothed dog. Not all the animals were pleased to see Angela. Some of them cowered in corners at her approach, as though recalling past encounters: others hurled themselves against tough wire mesh at her, ready to renew battle. At these, the unfavoured, she smiled grimly. She kicked one pup quite savagely as it tried to sneak past her into a corridor. They passed a room containing a huge wooden butcher’s slab with cleavers. A bunch of unskinned rabbits dangled from a hook.

  God’s creatures, said atheist Alix to herself as she tried, diplomatically, to praise the dogs. But these were not God’s creatures, they were Man’s: thoroughbred, overbred, monstrosities. Hideous parodies. This is what Alix thought, as she sat down to tea in the kitchen with Angela Whitmore Malkin. The walls of the kitchen were adorned with portraits of dogs, with photographs and prizes and newspaper cuttings and calendars. China dogs stood on the large dresser, plates emblazoned with dogs hung from brackets, there was even an oil painting of a dog, the largest and most monstrous of all. He was called Axminster Ajax. Alix met his eye coldly.

  Over tea, Alix persuaded Angela to talk about dogs and the Colonel. Everything she said reinforced Alix’s sense of having stumbled into a nightmare. These people lived and breathed dogs. It was crazy, it was ugly. What had Bill Whitmore said? ‘You’ll find it a queer place’—something like that. Yet presumably there were people in the outside world who thought the Colonel and the Doctor and Angela and Stanley quite normal. There was Mrs Simpson, for instance, who might have come, who yet might come about the two-months-old bitch. Alix shivered, as another sporadic burst of barking and howling broke out somewhere in the nether regions. What if Angela suddenly went for her with a cleaver, then fed her to the dogs? Not a scrap of her would ever be seen again. She would have vanished utterly, without trace, not a scrap of skin or hair or bone would be left for the forensic scientists to identify.

  ‘Yes, it’s a big house,’ Angela was saying. ‘We keep the front rooms up, but it’s hard work. Six years, the Colonel’s been here. He’s built it up beautifully.’

  Angela’s voice was harsh, high pitched, monotonous, yet at the same time overlaid and affected. Like the house and its grounds, she presented an uneasy combination of the kempt and the unkempt. Her hair was varnished into its high crown, and she was heavily made up, with green eye-shadow, false lashes, dark red lips, a false complexion imposed upon a natural uneven pallor. But her feet were clad in old scuffed jewelled high-heeled sandals and her slacks were stained. She wore large stud earrings of yellow metal, and a thick yellow metal choker necklace. Her varnished nails were very long—were they false too? A scar ran white and gleaming from her wrist up her inner arm, and vanished into the rolled-back cuff of her shirt.

  All Alix Bowen’s inherited social prejudices were revived into active play by the appearance of Angela Whitmore Malkin. She had, by Alix’s standards, got just about everything wrong.

  What on earth am I doing here, wondered Alix once more, as she braced herself for one more attempt. She didn’t even know how to address the woman. She’d tried and failed with Mrs Malkin on the letters. Now, accepting a second cup of tea, she went in on a new tack.

  ‘Mrs Whitmore,’ she said, ‘I know you don’t want to talk about Paul, but I do just want to say how very much he wants to hear from you. He doesn’t even know where you are. He says he hasn’t heard from you for many years.’

  ‘And you’re an interfering nosy little cow,’ said Angela, standing up and turning away. ‘You can tell that boy, tell him to keep off of me. Tell him to rot in hell. I wish he’d drop dead, I wish they’d do away with him. If you let on where I am, I’ll make sure you don’t get away with it.’

  Angela walked over to the back door, stared out. Alix said nothing.

  ‘I don’t want to hear nothing, get it? Nothing. Not a word, not ever. Nobody knows here, and I’m keeping it that way. Who put you on to me? The old man, was it? Look, Mrs Nosy Parker, I’ve shown you the dogs, and I’ve given you a cup of tea, and now you get out of here, double-quick, scram, or you’ll be sorry you ever set eyes on me.’

  Alix finished her cup of tea. She knew this tone quite well, from her years of work with female offenders in the Garfield Centre: sometimes she could deal with it, sometimes she couldn’t. She waited. Angela lit a cigarette.

  ‘Look,’ said Alix, ‘I know it’s upsetting for you, and it’s not very nice for me either, but if you could just bring yourself to think about Paul, just a little . . . ’

  Angela turned back into the room. ‘Think about that pig? Why should I? When did he ever give a thought to me? Nobody ever gave a thought to me. I’ve had to take care of myself, I have, I’ve had to fend for myself, and I’m not having the clock put back, not by anyone.’ She glared at Alix, harsh, brittle, malevolent. Trying to involve me, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, don’t. It’s all over, it’s all dead and rotten. And don’t you try blaming me for anything. Been whining at you, have they, the old man
and the pig?’

  Alix shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘nobody whined. Paul would like a letter from you. That’s all.’

  ‘You go back and tell him I’m dead. That’ll be the best day’s work you’ve ever done, you interfering bitch. Tell him I’m dead.’

  Alix sighed, pushed her cup away, stood up, reached in her shoulder bag for her driving glasses. ‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘In the circumstances, that might be the best thing.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Angela, pursuing Alix through long corridors to the front door. ‘And don’t you come back here again, madam. If you do, I’ll set the dogs on you.’

  Alix, who had been waiting for this phrase, was glad that it was not delivered until she was in sight of her car on the gravel drive. She looked back at the white house, at the caged deformities. She was rather sorry she hadn’t been shown the front rooms: she’d have liked to have gleaned a little more about the Colonel and the Doctor.

  ‘Thank you for the tea,’ she said, politely.

  ‘I’m warning you,’ said Angela, on the threshold.

  ‘I take the warning,’ said Alix. ‘I’ll think about it. Ah, I wonder if this is Mrs Simpson?’

  She put her key in the lock, opened her door, as another car pulled up, an estate car, with dog cage bars at the back. Mrs Simpson smiled, waved, as Alix started her engine and prepared to vacate her space: country civilities, middle-class smiles. Angela was obliged to smile too. Tall and fair and pleasant-faced was Mrs Simpson: whatever could she be wanting with a pedigree bull mastiff? Surely she would be happier with a Labrador, or a retriever, or a liver-spotted Dalmatian? But I’ve done enough interfering for one day, thought Alix, as she set off down the hill towards the cattle grid. Mrs Nosy Parker. Curiosity killed the cat. Alix smiled to herself, but a little shakily, as she turned on the car radio for company.

  Charles, on the aeroplane to Baldai, tried to distract himself from fear by pondering the possibilities of a new electronic television game called Collage, which combined unlikely images with unlikely text. Or images with images, perhaps? The fun possibilities of superimposition had surely not yet been properly explored? He recalled the ancient woodland and the giant oak and the flowing Barle. He wondered what sort of television they had in Baldai. Then he moved on to the concept of the sinful and adulterous generation, and tried to count all the women with whom he had ever committed adultery. Should he include those Cambridge undergraduates and that Italian girl? They hadn’t been classifiable as adultery, they’d been fornication. No, strictly, he should begin after his first marriage to Naomi. There was that Polish research assistant, and then a girl in Rome, and then—but no, that was later. And then there was Liz—did it qualify as adultery, sleeping with Liz after Naomi’s death before he married Liz? And what about that time only last year, when he’d slept with Liz in a hotel in Northam, after divorcing Liz and marrying Henrietta? Was that adultery? There were some tricky theological points here. Somehow Charles did not think that this was the kind of thing that Jesus Christ had been speaking of, in Mark 8:35. ‘Whosoever will save his life, shall lose it.’ That was more to the point. Charles reached, moodily, for the in-flight magazine, for some kind of reassurance, but on flicking it open at random found himself confronted by the not-at-all reassuring image of Henrietta herself, dressed in a khaki shirt and sage-green shorts, with a yellow bandana round her head, posing with her wicked cousin Guy Hestercombe in front of a group of zebra. She appeared to be advertising safaris in Zambia—well, not directly, of course, not commercially, she was merely a decoration added to an article by a travel writer, but there were quotations from her adorning the travel writer’s text. ‘I’ve always adored Zambia,’ says Lady Henrietta. ‘No other African country has its wildlife, its majesty, its richness! And I just love K.K.!’ Disquieted, Charles read on: Henrietta, it seemed, had been back here with a group of chums from her old, pre-Charles days, her old Latchett days. One of them was now running a safari business from an address in Princes Risborough. There were photographs of a sacred ibis, a lion, a bright-blue shoebill stork, a hippopotamus-infested lagoon. Henrietta had ‘adored’ it all! The hot showers! The obliging servants! Tea on the banks of the Zambesi!

  Well, well, well. She probably had adored it, in her own way. She liked that kind of thing. She had dragged Charles out to Zambia, during their brief marriage, partly to visit her granddaughter, partly to get some sun and see some game, and had trailed him round the marshes of Bangweulu and sat him in dug-out canoes and marched him after elusive rhino and, horror of horrors, made him fly in a one-propeller plane with a mad pilot who asked Charles to hold up the map and navigate. Charles had been terrified by the whole trip, terrified. And also slightly disapproving. He didn’t much care for the odd upper-class throwback twitches of behaviour that the place brought out in Henrietta (twitches also deplored, he could see, by her daughter and son-in-law). Her manner, there, became even more offhand and dictatorial than it was at home, she shouted at servants and sneered at the food in a way that Charles found distressing, although no one could ever have called Charles a polite man. Her behaviour out in the bush had been acceptable, the straw huts and camp-fires suited her, but the way she carried on in Lusaka and at the Frenches’ farm made Charles feel priggish and middle class, indeed it brought out a little of the long-buried egalitarian in him. She took him to watch a polo match (oh, the tedium!), and when that was over she took him to drinks in the clubhouse, where, leaning on the veranda, she inadvertently and drunkenly dropped her cigarette lighter into a thick prickly hedge. ‘Shit,’ said Henrietta, loudly, and then snapping her fingers, called, ‘Here, you, piccaninny!’ A small child materialized below the veranda wall. ‘Fetch,’ said Henrietta. And the small child scrabbled into the hedge, and searched, and eventually emerged, proud, smiling, dusty, scratched, triumphant. ‘Catch!’ said Henrietta, throwing down a small coin, after the child on tiptoe had reached up smiling and proudly delivered the lighter. The coin fell in the dust, under the prickly hedge, and the child scrabbled again.

  And Henrietta laughed.

  No, Henrietta in Zambia had not been endearing. Zambia had not endeared her. But there she was again, in her khaki shirt and green shorts, smiling in the sun with that old philanderer Guy Hestercombe. A worthless crowd. Yes, worthless. An adulterous, sinful generation.

  Charles felt smug and serious, as he contemplated the frivolous and outmoded follies of his ex-wife and her cronies. He would have felt even more smug and serious had he known that at that moment the postman was delivering to his flat in Kentish Town an invitation which would let him off the hook of all his financial muddles and gambles, an invitation to a salaried post, a serious, acceptable and dignified post. But Charles did not know this, for he was five miles above the earth, spinning eastwards on his way to Baldai.

  Mrs Nosy Parker, Angela had called her. On reflection, Alix found she did not like this form of address at all. It seemed undignified yet uncomfortably apposite. A schoolgirl’s insult, not the name for an earnest seeker after truth, nor even for a bungling well-wisher trying to restore child to parent, parent to child. Angela had sent her packing with a flea in her ear. No, she had not liked Angela. Angela had been as unpleasant, more unpleasant than the more difficult inmates of the Garfield Centre. Angela seemed more like a hardened criminal than they did. Lacquer and varnish and cringing dogs. Despite herself, Alix continued to wonder about the Doctor and the Colonel.

  Alix did not mention her visit to Brian and Sam, although it weighed upon her mind. She watched the television news silently, as policemen with tracker dogs hunted the moor for the buried corpses of long-dead murdered children, as the mothers of these children, prodded and goaded by the press, said they would never never forgive.

  Nobody feels sorry for the victims, somebody said, predictably. But this, of course, was nonsense. Anyone with an ounce of imagination, or even without it, felt sorry for the victims, and the families of the victims. But however sorry one (or we) felt, the v
ictims remained dead, buried high on the lonely moor, or burned to white ash in a north London crematorium. Whereas P. Whitmore was alive, in Porston Prison.

  Of course Alix was sorry for Paul Whitmore’s victims, for those who had had the ill luck to come his way at the wrong moment. That goes without saying. She did not think about them much because she could not bear to do so. Thinking about them served no purpose. One of these victims had been her friend Jilly Fox. Alix had seen Jilly Fox’s parents appear on television to express their grief, their loss, their unwillingness ever to forgive. Jilly Fox’s parents had refused to give her houseroom after her release from a prison sentence for drug charges. They had driven her back to the Harrow Road and dumped her there. Jilly Fox’s parents had been away on a package tour holiday in Marrakesh when Jilly had been murdered, and they had not cut short their week in the sun. Jilly Fox’s father was a narrow-minded sadist who had tormented his daughter into drugs, into prison, and to death. Well, that was one way of looking at the sequence of events. Jilly’s way. He was the criminal, not Paul Whitmore. Paul Whitmore had been the executioner.

  Alix sat and watched television.

  That month, in England, a tramp had been burned to death ‘for a laugh’ by two youths as he sheltered in his cardboard hut.

  A man in Hansborough had slept two nights in bed with his girlfriend without noticing she was dead. ‘I suppose I must have been drunk,’ he said.

  A prisoner bullied his cell-mate in Wormwood Scrubs to commit suicide ‘because he was a nutter’.

  A man was tried for cutting off his girlfriend’s mother’s head and then murdering a passing stranger with a crossbow. He had put the head on his girlfriend’s pillow and tucked the rest of the woman into the bedclothes: ‘To give my girlfriend a fright,’ he said. He said he did not know why he had killed the stranger on the pavement.