A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  A skinhead ‘rent collector’ was remanded in custody for terrorizing fellow-squatters and torturing one to death by means of wire, glass and scalding water.

  A mother was tried for killing her twelve-month-old baby by putting salt in his bottle. The baby had already been buggered by the forty-four-year-old husband. She admitted cruelty but denied a charge of unlawful killing.

  A man was killed when his mates playfully thrust him into the back of a refuse truck: the Vulture beak got him.

  A couple of youths attacked an old lady, tied her up, stuffed her in a broom cupboard, and set her house on fire: then they had run away, then they had run back to rescue her, at the risk of their own lives and in certain expectation of arrest and imprisonment. ‘I don’t know why we changed our minds,’ one said.

  A woman was raped in a field, then had her throat cut by a gang of five. They slit her throat so that she would not be able to tell on them.

  Lavinia, speechless, gushes blood, from mouth and stumps of arms.

  Spot the one invented story, if you can. No prize offered.

  Brian has never liked Titus Andronicus, has always considered it one of Shakespeare’s lesser plays.

  That night, Alix dreamed of a dog. Not a bull mastiff, but a mongrel dog, an ordinary brown-and-black dog-shaped dog. In her dream, Alix was in charge of it. She was waiting with it, in the vet’s surgery. When her turn came, she went in, and a white-uniformed woman took hold of the dog, and before Alix could intervene, sliced off its tail. The dog did not even whimper. It turned to Alix and looked at her with terrible betrayed eyes and hid its head in her wide skirts. Alix comforted the poor sliced bleeding dog. It made no sound, no sound. She held it and held it, as the white-uniformed woman of her dream, the woman with the knife, began to bluff and bluster. And Alix heard herself begin to shout back, with the rage of years of courtesy: she began to shout abuse and condemnation at the monster woman on behalf of the silent, quivering, maimed dog, the poor dog sheltering in her skirts. The poor dog, the harmless poor dog. Alix wept. In her dream, angrily, she wept, and woke weeping.

  ‘Anger is natural,’ said Liz to her patient, in patient cliché. ‘If you repress it, it manifests itself in these curious forms.’

  Liz was paying little attention: his hour was nearly up, and anyway Mr Joby didn’t really repay attention, he was a self-pitying bore. Or that is how Liz would have judged him had she met him socially, rather than professionally. She was trying to offload Joby. The sadness of dullness, the dullness of sadness.

  Liz herself was still suffering from a bout of anger brought on the night before by a phone call from her eldest stepson Jonathan. Jonathan had rung, ostensibly about Charles, but had then moved on to the equally dangerous topic of Liz’s views on infantile sexuality. How had it come up? Liz, looking at her watch, easing out Joby, bidding him goodbye (or rather, alas, au revoir), couldn’t quite remember. Had Jonathan heard her most recent radio broadcast? Yes, that had probably been it. And he’d dared to—well, not exactly to tick her off, but to imply that her interest in the topic was an embarrassment to him. To him, Jonathan, personally.

  Liz snorted to herself as she began to go through the post on her desk. He had actually said, ‘Of course, Liz, I know it’s a fashionable subject, and you’re always on to every new fashion, but I do think you might give this one a miss, when everyone else is making such a dog’s dinner of it. You’ll only upset yourself.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Liz, ‘don’t talk to me as though I were a frail old granny with a weak heart. I’m not very easily upset.’ And then, remembering that she was, although not frail, a granny, she had changed the subject by asking about Baby Cornelia’s teeth.

  Every new fashion. Liz pondered these words as she looked through her post. Fashion. Jonathan and Xanthe were fashionable, she supposed, they wore smart clothes, they always had a new car or two, they had a new baby, they had two personally designed bathrooms and curtains that matched their upholstery and they spent a lot of money on eating out and amusing themselves. This is the way people were, these days, and it seemed a little hard to be reproached by Jonathan for being fashionable when she was surely by now (she glanced down for confirmation at her old jersey dress) out of date?

  Jonathan, the motherless babe whom she had courted and cajoled and seduced into loving her. Jonathan, who had taught her motherhood, whom she had taught to read. A is for Ant, B is for Bee. The Lonely Unicorn, his favourite picture book. (Ah, why, asks her other self. Ah, why?) She could no longer remember the warm softness of him, the butter-yellow scalp smell of his hair, his scuffed knees, his runny nose. He rounded on her now, and accused her.

  Of fashion. Well, it was true, in an affluent society there is fashion in crimes and neuroses and diseases, as in clothes and cars and mustards and salad foliages, as in streets and furnishings and flowers and fabrics. And it was also true that child sex abuse had become suddenly, astonishingly fashionable, as a theme for indignation, moralizing, vindictiveness, sensational journalism. Liz herself had been taken by surprise by the violence of this new eruption of the nation’s psyche. It was not a subject in which she had been particularly interested: adopted children rather than abused children had been more her line. Fancying herself fatherless, never having known her father, she had adopted adoption as a speciality. But of late, having, as she had thought, located her father, she had changed tack. And was it her fault that the whole nation had changed tack with her? Was she, as Jonathan seemed to allege, somehow guilty of exploitation? Because she had anticipated public interest by a few months, because her unfortunate father had anticipated this newly fashionable offence by fifty years?

  She could understand Jonathan’s resentment. It was not a happy subject, not a wholesome subject. ‘Normal’ people shied away from it, as they had (and do) from the revelations of Freud. Was Freud right, after all, in his initial assessments of the high incidence of abuse of children by parents? Was this what we were about to have to face? Jonathan certainly would not like it if he had to. And nor would she. She had had erotic dreams about Jonathan, when he was a boy. Had he of her? She had also had erotic dreams of Aaron and of Alan. Human nature. She wondered how Stephen Cox’s inquiries into the matter were progressing.

  We stare backwards into time, and continue to find new plots, new patterns.

  Liz remembered wandering as a small child alone round Woolworth’s in Northam, in the crowds, a child so small that she could hardly see what was on the glass-edged metal-jointed counters, in the smell of artificial ice-cream and harsh sugar and sawdust and cheap perfume, a metallic, dangerous, powdery smell which she had loved. Every now and then, as she wandered, she would feel a hand between her legs, tickling her bottom, pressing into her little cleft, and each time she would turn, sharply, to see who was there. And there was nobody there, as in that game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, there was nobody there at all, only shabby old men gazing into space way above her head, intent, no doubt, on purchasing dull male commodities like electric plugs or screwdrivers or lengths of wire, ignorant of and indifferent to the little girl in cotton frock and cotton pants that struggled on ahead of them through the human flow. She had never managed to surprise anyone, to catch anyone, even to guess at anyone responsible for that fleeting (and yes, delightful) sensation, so often repeated—maybe, so often sought? Had she liked Woolworth’s because of the dirty old men?

  These thoughts now held no fears for her. They held no fears because she had thought them. It was as simple as that. She had woven her father into a plot, a pattern, and allowed him to emerge as harmless, inoffensive, suffering perhaps from some glandular abnormality: a timid man, sexually inadequate, with an unindulgent wife. Not a Horror. Not a Fiend. No, almost normal.

  Lauritzen had found that the precipitating behaviour of the ‘victim’ played an important part in 48.4 per cent of cases of conviction for indecent exposure. (Though the sample, one had to admit, was small and, his critics argued, ill selected.)

  Liz ha
d come to terms with the possibilities of her own precipitating behaviour.

  The thoughts that we have thought hold no fear. It is the unthought that holds us in thrall. Those burned papers, with their secret writing, emerging in the blackened ash, but stuffed down, tamped down, ignored, consumed in the Ideal Boiler. Letters of fire.

  What we do not know is what we most know.

  We pursue the known unknown, on and on, beyond the limits of the known world. What was that phrase Stephen had used? The fatal curiosity? When we see the Gorgon face to face, we die.

  Liz, in her half-hour break before going down for lunch, brooded over these things. The meaning of symbols. The knowing of the unknown. She thought of Alix and the murderer. She thought of Stephen, vanished into Kampuchea. She thought of Cliff Harper, sitting slumped in his car in his garage full of fumes. She thought of her friend Esther Breuer, who had run away from England and the murderer’s house of death, away from continuity and fear of continuity, into the unknown—away from, or towards, her destiny? She thought of Shirley, who had run from the face or threat of death, and had perhaps met her own Gorgon by now, at the bottom of a well, in a drowned car, at a cliff’s foot. She thought of Charles, on his way to seek the dried husk, the flickering videotaped image of his old enemy, Dirk Davis. She tried to think of the whole human race, on its quest for its own self and its own destruction. The death instinct. For a moment, she encompassed it, she saw it for what it was, in its whole cycle, but then lost it again, her vision failed her, she shrank and sank back into her body, into her consulting room, into her contemplation of the letters on her desk.

  Open before her lay a thick white Private and Confidential crested letter from a Lord Rothven, President of the National Child Care Trust, attempting to enlist her advice on how to cope with scandal. Her eyes skimmed once more over the text and subtext. ‘ . . . hope you will not mind . . . enclosed papers relating to the case of . . . long associated, now in paid employment of our organization . . . you may recall, I had the pleasure of sitting next to you at the Annual Dinner of the Royal College of . . . emboldened to approach you by one of our distinguished VicePatrons, your friend Hilda Stark . . . subject of great delicacy . . . perhaps your secretary could ring mine to make an appointment. Yours sincerely . . . ’

  Jonathan would not like this at all. A scandal in high places, a child sex pornography scandal, involving the deputy director of one of our most respectable children’s charities. Suspended on full pay. All publicity so far successfully avoided, said Rothven. ‘Criminal proceedings inevitable . . . your professional advice much valued . . . suspected links with the UNICEF arrests connected with the Brussels Research and Information Centre of Childhood and Sexuality . . . ’ And now Lord Rothven and Hilda Stark and all the other rubber-stamp patrons, all the royals and minor titles and captains of industry and television personalities, would have to run around in circles trying to pretend they couldn’t possibly have known anything about it, that it wasn’t their fault, that nobody ever told them anything.

  Rothven’s tone was perfectly decent, thought Liz. He wasn’t prepared to ditch this guy without a struggle.

  Suddenly into Liz’s mind swims the image of the young man who had run the cub group Jonathan had once so keenly attended. A poor, virginal paedophile if ever there was one, utterly harmless, utterly recognizable to boys and mothers alike, recognizable to all save himself, and what harm had he done, teaching the children to tie their woggles and shine their badges and run races and fry eggs and light fires and wash their socks? A domestic young man, a devoted young man, with his thin neck and short hair and anxious eyes, a young man who believed in Christianity and clean living and team spirit and comradely communion. The most lonely young man in the world.

  Maybe all the charities in Britain are staffed by delinquents, deviants, perverts. And what was Hilda Stark doing in this galère? Hilda had once been a patient of Liz’s, a patient suffering from murderous impulses towards her baby daughter. An actress, a woman in the public eye, a showy woman who looked good on platforms, whose name adorned several fashionable charity appeals. Was it really wise of Hilda to have jumped on this particular bandwagon? Or had she jumped on it because of her own murky psychiatric past? After all, the baby daughter was now a strapping netball player with six O-Levels to her credit, and some expensive braces on her large front teeth. Let bygones be bygones.

  Poor Lord Rothven, poor Hilda Stark, poor—. Poor all, poor everyone. Crazily pursuing what we most deplore. Who pushes us? Is it a mass psychosis, as Alix sometimes desperately suggests, a Hegelian supermadness that transcends the individual? Hippies at Stonehenge were its victims last year, child sex abusers and social workers this year, and who next? Long-distance coach drivers? Rural estate agents? Drinking housewives or drug-addicted surgeons? Hard not to believe, looking at the gutter press, that there must be some transcendent madness, for how could human beings who eat and sleep and shop in supermarkets and have children and use the lavatory ever be party to such persecutions, such witch hunts, now, in the late twentieth century? Is it the fault of Charles Headleand and his like? Have they let the genie out of the bottle, the genie that centuries of civilization and enlightenment had tried to imprison?

  Publicity. Press. The new demons of democracy.

  The week before, Liz had been seated at a gala dinner of the RIBA at the Goldsmiths’ Hall next to a Law Lord who had been involved in the earlier stages of P. Whitmore’s trial. She had endured his strong and ill-informed views on the Corbusier exhibition and the new Lloyd’s building and the new Tate extension (none of which he had visited), and then had edged him on to P. Whitmore. Here, he had been illuminating. He had of course, he said, been of the opinion that Whitmore was as mad as a meat-axe (he glared at Liz as he said this, as though assuming she would dissent), and that he should not stand trial for murder, but the judge in the case had taken another view. Why? Liz had demurely inquired. ‘Because,’ said the red but shrivelled little walnut of a man, ‘because he wanted his fortnight of glory. The limelight. The press. Oh yes, he wanted his name in the papers, he wanted the limelight.’

  He spoke as one who understood this craving. A small old man who knew nothing about Corbusier, but who could distinguish the sane from the criminally insane, because that was his job. And who understood, moreover, the human frailties of his colleagues. The wigs and robes and medals and the ribbons and silver buckles. The headlines. Corruption and vanity. And people call women vain, reflected Liz, as she listened to the old lord. He did not ask her a single question throughout the meal. Liz did not mind, much: she was used to banal, self-obsessed monologues. She was a professional listener. Occasionally, as she listened, it had crossed her mind to interrupt him by claiming acquaintance with the infamous Whitmore, but she held her peace and let him talk.

  Wigs and buckles. Leaders in the press. And thus it was that Paul Whitmore was incarcerated in Porston Prison, complaining about his vegetarian meals, rather than complaining about similar meals in Broadmoor or Rampton. It probably didn’t make much difference where he was. To him. Though the decision had cost the state some money, as the old walnut knew.

  The limelight. A curious word. Tidying up her letters, drifting towards lunch, she paused to look it up in her Pocket Oxford: ‘Intense white light obtained by heating cylinder of lime in oxyhydrogen flame; (fig.) full glare of publicity.’ Was that what Hilda Stark bathed in daily? Was that what P. W. had wanted? And had got? She looked up quicklime. ‘Unslaked lime.’ No reference to Oscar Wilde or Reading Gaol.

  She put the dictionary back on the shelf and stood for a moment irresolute. Into the silence, the telephone rang. Her secretary Vera spoke: there was a Mr Robert Holland on the line, wanting to speak to Liz about her sister, would she take the call? Liz found her mouth had gone dry. ‘Yes,’ she said. She had a very clearly transmitted picture of Shirley dead, lying in a shallow white outcast’s grave.

  Fanny Kettle was planning the finer details of her party. She was
happy doing this, and her son Tony was happy for her. They sat together at the kitchen-table, surrounded by lists. He liked to see her innocently busy.

  ‘I make it fifty-two acceptances, twelve refusals, and twenty who haven’t replied,’ said Tony.

  ‘Well, I asked the caterers to do seventy-five, so I guess that’s just about right,’ said Fanny.

  ‘Did we ever hear from the Duke?’ asked Fanny, who knew quite well that we had, but who liked to dwell on such matters.

  Tony searched through the pile and found the handsome crested papers. ‘A very polite apology from the Duke, he’s at a dinner in Manchester, he much regrets. Regrets too from the Marquis of Stocklinch. But Lady Joanna Hestercombe is coming or so she says.’

  ‘Odd, that,’ said Fanny. ‘I wonder why?’

  Tony stared at her thick grey headed missive, but it offered no clue. Lady Joanna Hestercombe, Aspin Court Farm, Stocklinch, it said. Telephone Stocklinch 329.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Tony. ‘Maybe she likes parties?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, from the look of her. Horses are more her thing, I’m told. I wonder if we ought to order some more canapes?’

  They checked numbers, the names of delicacies, poring over the glossy brochure of the smart catering firm recommended by one of Ian’s television chaps. ‘The bacon rolls stuffed with chicken livers sound good,’ said Tony, hungrily, cutting himself another hunk of cheddar from the glistening ochre deeply fissured slab at his elbow, ‘and the crab claws in garlic dip. Yummy.’

  ‘What I’m planning,’ said Fanny, ‘is a really spectacular drink. It would be fun to start people off with a really exciting ‘coloured drink. What do you think, Tony darling?’

  He nodded, munching. He was wondering whether Alice Enderby, daughter of Janice and Edward Enderby, would come to the party with her parents. Should he make a point of making sure she was invited, or would Fanny tease him if he did?