The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  But the most alarming manifestation of madness had been her VAT challenge. This had frightened them more than any of her other oddities, for the financial consequences had seemed incalculable. She had taken on the mighty indifference of Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise in a court of law. It was an unprecedented action. She had asserted that the VAT inspector’s report on her bookkeeping had been ignorant and incompetent, she disputed this forward and pert young woman’s assessment of the VAT and VAT status of her Swedish booty, and she refused to charge VAT on certain expenses incurred outside the UK. She insisted that Her Majesty owed her interest, now, not next year, on a year’s overpayment. Her accountants had not liked this procedure at all, and had tried to dissuade her: unwise to venture into such grey areas, she was advised. But Frieda, who had taken against the inspector with a vengeance, was determined. She said she was prepared to spend her entire capital and go to gaol for this cause célèbre. Let the light shine in the grey areas, she had insisted. Her regular lawyers had refused to act for her, but she had found other lawyers quite willing to take her money: the name of their firm was Goltho & Goltho. The enterprise had proved expensive but not ruinous. She had confronted the experts, and had stood her ground as they shook their heads and wagged their fingers and sneered and talked gobbletalk at her. The original inspector, produced as witness, had been unwisely condescending; neatly suited, smartly lipsticked, with bouncy bobbed hair and an air of implacable self-righteousness, she had tried to make the old lion look a fool. Little smiles, becks, innuendoes. But Frieda had refused to budge. She had got her case up well. and she had argued it well. Little Miss Cockburn Cocksure had been confused and wrongfooted. Miss Cockburn could hardly believe that this was the same shabby old creature she had been to see in Romley. Why had nobody warned her? But, as Frieda argued, Miss Cocksure’s ignorance was no excuse. She was not paid to be ignorant.

  The case ended in a stand-off. Both sides claimed victory, but the moral victory was Frieda’s. A good deal of unpleasant publicity had been generated, and the public was on Frieda’s side. She had presented herself as the Little Woman, fighting for justice against the bureaucrat, and indeed for the duration of the hearing had managed to see herself in that light: she had not managed to convince her children of her harmlessness and frailty, and the tribunal had its suspicions too, but even her son Daniel had to concede that she’d had a case and made the best of it. ‘I don’t like being pushed around, at my age,’ had been her explanation for her conduct. ‘I don’t like pert little nobodies coming into my house and drinking my coffee and talking to me as if I’m a halfwit. Do you know what that woman called me? Frieda! She addressed me as Frieda. On a first meeting. Without a by-your-leave. I wasn't going to let her get away with that, was I?’ It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for Miss Cocksure, with her round eyes and her prim pink cheeks and her double-breasted navy-and-white striped jacket and her brass buttons and her silly frilly white jabot.

  When the case was over the family heaved a sigh of relief, and wondered what she would take up next. Bee-keeping, bicycling, or yet more litigation? Was she intent on squandering her money? What, they wondered, of their rightful inheritance? They were all doing nicely at the moment, but these days, with pensions so unreliable, the working life so short, the afterlife so long, the private care so expensive, the health service demolished–who could tell what costly interminable terminal care she or they or their grandchildren’s grandchildren might need? Had she the right to go mad?

  Possibly, speculated Gogo, Frieda’s mind had been affected by her mother’s death. Gladys Haxby, stout and static, had died five years ago–died where she had lived, at a good old age, in the little cottage in Chapel Street in Dry Bendish where Frieda had been born. There had been no love lost between Gladys and Frieda, and not much pretence of a warmth between Gladys and her three grandchildren. But Frieda had visited regularly, curiously and improbably dutiful, until the end, driving up and down the dual-carriageway, at least once every three months when she was in England. Why did she go? Because she was the only child. (There had been another daughter, but she had died long ago; and Frieda’s father had died, of a stroke, in his fifties.) Maybe, suggested Gogo, over dinner in Islington, on the phone to her siblings, at table in Hampshire–maybe Gladys’s death had tipped some balance in Frieda? Frieda had been a grim worker all her life, and she had been held in grim combat by Gladys. In Gladys’s presence, Frieda was oddly subdued, reverting to a morbid attentive unwilling servitude that suggested what she had been like as a sulky, determined, ambitious child. Gladys Haxby had been a schoolmistress, and in her demanding and irksome company Frieda became once more a pupil, a listener, although she had nothing to learn and Gladys had nothing to say. Frieda, herself no mean talker, fell silent in her mother’s presence, as Gladys talked and talked and talked, of nothing. Of herself, of nothing. An unchanging subjugation.

  Then Gladys died, and Frieda was set free. This was Gogo’s theory. It was the headiness of freedom in her sixties, the late liberation from the guilt of the tedious and armchair-bound old bloodsucker, that had sent her spinning off into space and seventeenth-century Sweden. It must have been on Gladys’s death that Frieda had started her last disastrous literary enterprise. None of them had known what she was plotting, for she never talked about her work in advance; ever a solitary worker, she had hidden her typewriter from prying children’s eyes, and in later years, when there were none to pry, she had become secretive–and, if questioned, obscure and misleading. She had, before publication, conceded that she had departed from her usual arena to write a historical novel–but that statement, surprising enough in itself, had prepared nobody for the vast, incoherent over-researched baroque monstrosity of her Queen Christina. Her children had found it almost embarrassingly unreadable (although Gogo declared it had some good passages), and the reviews had been appalled and appalling. How could Frieda Haxby, social analyst, prophet, sage and sybil, and author of that perennial and influential classic The Matriarchy of War–how could Frieda Haxby have written such tosh?

  The critics were delighted, and outdid one another in insults. ‘Once seen as Britain’s answer to Simone de Beauvoir, Frieda Haxby has revealed herself as the heir to Barbara Cartland,’ declared one of the Sundays. ‘Long a symbol of the austere and high-minded rigidity of the postwar left, Miss Haxby’s latest effort throws into doubt all that preceded it,’ somewhat ungrammatically declared one of the organs of the New Right, under the heading THE EMPRESS’S NEW CLOTHES. ‘Senile ramblings,’ posited an old-fashioned new literary review. The kindest comment suggested that Frieda, like George Eliot in Romola, had been bogged down by too much historical detail, and hoped (a little wanly, as though the last book the reviewer ever wanted to see arrive in a Jiffy bag was another work by Haxby) that she would soon return to her ‘spare, challenging and relevant interpretations of social organizations’.

  Frieda seemed undisturbed by this, but how could one tell what she really felt? Patiently, she pointed out that although she had indeed had a long and interesting correspondence with de Beauvoir, she had never been a member of any political party, and had kept her distance from both left and right. She said that she entirely agreed with one critic who called The Matriarchy of War ^n overrated and outdated thesis which did not deserve its reputation–she’d been in her twenties when she’d written it, and subsequent research into the topic of female employment during the World Wars had contradicted or at least qualified many of her earlier findings. It was a book for its time, and it wasn’t her fault if people in later decades used it for their own purposes. And as for Queen Christina–well, she’d enjoyed writing it, and where was the harm in that? She could write about what she liked. Thus, reasonably, she replied to her interviewers. Her appearance of calm and unruffled detachment did nothing to pacify them. She seemed quite unaware of the nature of the atrocity she was alleged to have committed. She had betrayed nobody. If others had false expectations, if others had waited for answ
ers that she could not or would not give–that was their problem, not hers. They had been misreading her all along.

  At other moments, in other contexts, she appeared less reasonable. She suddenly threatened to sue a journalist who had described her as an ageing Peacenik and supporter of the Women of Greenham Common: hadn’t he bothered to check that inside and outside the Labour Party she’d made herself very unpopular right through the fifties and sixties by supporting the nuclear deterrent and opposing unilateral disarmament? He’d clearly got no further than the tide of her first publication, which, far from proposing disarmament, had described the ways in which women had at least temporarily profited from the wartime economy, and which had regretted the way they’d let themselves be shoved back into peacetime underemployment. The journalist had apologized, in print, for his error, acknowledging that he had confused her track-record as warmonger with that of some of her eminent and more peace-loving contemporaries. She had dropped her threat: the swine wasn’t worth contradicting, she decided. Or so she told David, who told Gogo, who told Daniel and Rosemary.

  It was Patsy who heard the oddest commentary of all. Driving home late one night from London to Hampshire, about a fortnight after the publication of Queen Christina, Patsy had heard Frieda on the radio declaring to some spaced-out disc jockey that the idea of writing the novel had come to her ‘as I stood staring at the stone cross with runes near my ancestral home in Dry Bendish in Lincolnshire’. At that moment, as she laid her hand on the ancient monument, she told the young man, she had known that she was linked by blood to Queen Christina of Sweden–scholar, patron of the arts, lesbian, atheist, accomplice of assassins. ‘You mean a kind of reincarnation, kind of?’ the disc jockey had asked: and to Patsy’s surprise Frieda, instead of snapping his head off, had mildly agreed. ‘Yes, well, I suppose, kind of,’ she had said. And had gone on to talk about the Vikings, and about her earlier research into the eighteenth-century iron trade of Sweden, and her voyage round the Swedish coast in the wake of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the honour done to her by the Swedish crown for her recovery of a little-known tract of Swedish history. The disc jockey hadn’t been so interested in all this, Patsy could tell, but he’d let the old thing ramble. Mad indeed. Patsy had hesitated to tell Daniel and the other Palmers of this damning piece of evidence, but had been unable to resist. Queen Christina, crazy herself, had driven Frieda Haxby crazy.

  It was some three months after the publication of this ill-starred work that Frieda had summoned her family to the Grim Feast in Romley. During these three months Frieda had been attacked by historians of the right and the left, by feminists, lesbians, gossip columnists and cartoonists, by Catholics, Protestants and humanists. Christina had managed to annoy just about everybody. Nobody seemed to have read it (for it was very long) but everybody knew it was no good, and that it had ruined Frieda Haxby’s reputation as a social historian.

  So Daniel and Patsy, Gogo and David, Rosemary and Nathan were not expecting a very happy evening when they were summoned to the Mausoleum, to the house that had been the childhood home of the three Palmers.

  Let us return, with them, from Hampshire to Romley. A year and a half has passed since the gathering, though it has not faded from their minds.

  There the old house still stood, shabby, stranded, archaic, fronting a stretch of municipal suburban greenery that had once been their playground, and which was now strewn with litter–plastic bags, sweet and crisp packets, beer cans, cola cans, and, no doubt, if one looked more closely, condoms and syringes. The tragedy of the commons. When they were small, Romley, though deeply dreary and unfashionable, had not been dangerous; but a wash of grief and misery had swept eastwards to it from Hackney and Leytonstone, as its more successful and forceful residents had pushed their way westwards against the tide to Stoke Newington and Highbury and Finsbury Park. Now Frieda’s house stood like a beached, bow-fronted galleon fronting the trodden sour and muddy green. On either side houses had been demolished or converted into flatlets or maisonettes, first by the council, and now, since council spending had been suspended, by housing associations. Frieda’s house alone stood as it had in the late 1940s when she and their father had bought it. It was a large, wide, late-Victorian, red brick house, four storeyed, with an air of some pretension: the slightly raised ground floor swelled into a curved and monumental frontage far grander than a suburban bay, with a hint of funerary or temple architecture that had prompted the building’s pet name–an affectionate name, in its own way, a name bestowed in order to placate the Furies. The Mausoleum, with Frieda as priestess. The three of them did not know if they hated it or not. It was their place. Here they had huddled, and here they had, after their fashion, survived.

  What were her plans for it now? Plans she had, they were certain, or they would not have been convened. It was not Christmas. And she had given up celebrating Christmas more than ten years ago. Last year she had flown off to Jamaica. Or so she had said. (Some said she had been seen over the New Year at the tables in Monte Carlo.)

  Daniel and Patsy had met Rosemary and Nathan outside, on the pavement: Daniel had spotted Nathan parking his flash red sports car from afar, and had waited, to make a joint entry. They could see Gogo and David were there already, for there was David’s sober Honda, by the cracking kerb. They greeted one another in the soft autumn light. Patsy was carrying a bunch of tightly budded lilies, their pods still green and unripe though faintly streaked with emergent orange: they wore a red triangular laminated label which, in anticipation of litigation, declared that their pollen could stain clothing. Rosemary clutched a bottle of champagne. Who knows, she said, as she pecked Patsy on the cheek, there may be something to celebrate? Who knows? And they had all paused on the pavement, looking up at the brooding building, where Frieda had incarcerated herself, and worked and worked and worked, night after night, for bread and butter and glory and the enlightenment of mankind. ‘You’re right,’ muttered Daniel to Nathan, as they ascended the short flight of badly cemented uneven, peeling steps to the front door, and congregated round the Victorian coalhole. ‘You’re right. There’s a plan for an extension to the motorway. Do you think she’ll turn stubborn and refuse to budge?’

  Nathan shrugged. With the new mad random Frieda, who could tell? She might decide to chain herself to a tree in protest, or she might offer to wield the axe herself.

  Gogo answered the doorbell, with a look of warning on her face. They could hear Frieda and David deep in conversation, but there was also a third voice–whose could it be?

  ‘It’s that Cedric chap,’ whispered Gogo discouragingly. ‘God knows why he’s here. He certainly doesn’t, I can tell you.’

  ‘Cedric who?’

  ‘That politician chappie,’ muttered Gogo, her back to the antlered hat-stand, where Nathan hung his umbrella. ‘You know, the one before last.’

  A pageant of rejected lovers and admirers stretched back through their communal memory, in file, wringing their hands, grinning, sneering, flattering, soothing, blinking, each after his fashion. Portly ghosts, cadaverous suitors. Some had come in the old days with sweets for the children, some had tried to make themselves agreeable. Cedric had been too late in line to bother them, except as an embarrassment. For it is not pleasant to learn that one’s mother is having a fling with a government minister, and a grotesque minister, of the wrong party, and of quite the wrong shape.

  As we enter the room the contrast between David D’Anger and Cedric Summerson strikes forcibly. Both sit, politely alert, legs uncrossed, leaning slightly forward, on the edges of their broken-down easy-chairs (who knows what may lurk in their recesses, were one to relax and sit back?), both hold glasses of what looks like still water in their hands–Evian, no doubt, or Malvern. An abstemious couple, though Cedric Summerson’s complexion does not boast of prolonged restraint. Both are suited and wear pale ties, but there the resemblance ends. Cedric Summerson is not exactly fat, but he is heavy–stout,jowled, red-faced, ponderous. The colour and texture
of his skin are unattractive. It is mottled, pitted, veined, at once shiny and coarse. Good living has sent him off like an old ripe cheese. Runnels of decay thread his features. He is turning bad before one’s eyes. How can Frieda ever have fancied this monster? Did she, ever, or was it all a rumour? And if it was a rumour, why is he here?

  Whereas David D’Anger is beautiful. His skin is dark and clear and smooth, his features are regular, and his eyes glow with an ideal and gentle light. Sweet reason and intelligence shine in his fine brow. His hair curls bravely, whereas Cedric’s is thin and slicked vainly back like a Chicago bootlegger’s.

  Frieda Haxby holds court. She may or may not think she is Queen Christina, but she certainly thinks she is Queen of the Mausoleum. She sits less formally than her two guests, her legs crossed beneath some kind of longish grey garment embroidered with black, which hides her now shapeless body. Her hair is concealed, like Gogo’s, by a scarf, and in honour of the occasion she wears her Baltic amber ceremonial cross. She too appears to be drinking water, which is not like her. She greets her family without rising. Cedric leaps obediently to his feet. Hands are shaken. Rosemary, with diminishing confidence, hands over her bottle of warming champagne. Frieda puts it on the table in front of her, and says, ‘Not for me, thank you. There’s some water in the jug.’

  And that is that. Nobody dares to open the champagne, and there is no other drink in sight, apart from a large stoneware quart jug of what seems to be tap water. They serve themselves and sip its thin fluoride kidney-filtered brew.

  Has Frieda become a teetotaller? Has she become religious? They settle themselves, nervously, uncertainly, and wait for something to happen.

  They wait for a long, long time. It is a deep game. Frieda lights a menthol cigarette and offers one to Nathan. Nathan refuses her offer, lights one of his own, and the others, non-smokers, gaze in greedy envy as they inhale deeply.