The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Over pudding–a large, unsuspicious nursery apple-crumble–she elaborated. They had heard the story of how she had tried to get rid of the car? They hadn’t even let her get rid of it. She was chained to it. Why bother with cars, with roads, with going from place to place? It had all gone wrong. She would remove herself. Urban life was poisonous. The air was impure, the foodstuffs were contaminated. Madness had fallen on the land and she had caught it. People could no longer tell the good from the bad. You only had to look around to see that they were suffering from a terminal disease. They crowded together to die, like a species intent on extinction. Pallid, shuffling, talking to themselves, crazy. Even when they thought they were having fun–and she pronounced the word ‘fun’ with impressive venom–they were stoking themselves with misery. She had walked through that dreadful little open air piazza in Covent Garden the other day and she had seen people sitting at tables eating food that was garbage. She had seen mould growing on a slice of wet giant quiche. She had smelt vomit, and had then discovered that what she smelt was not vomit but burger and pizza. People were eating food that smelt of hot vomit (sorry, Rosemary, are you feeling better now?), of regurgitated vomit. Like biblical dogs, they ate. She had pursued the burger story, spotted in a tiny four-line news item in the Independent, and had taken herself to abattoirs in Middleton and Somerset. She had seen the light. And while in Somerset she had bought a castle by the sea. She had walked into an estate agent’s and bought it. And there, alone, she would moulder.

  Triumphantly, she lit another carcinogenic cigarette.

  ‘And you think’, inquired Rosemary, ‘that you will find the countryside full of pure, clean-living, ecologically correct people? It isn’t, you know. It’s full of burgers too. Even fuller of burgers than Covent Garden.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Frieda. ‘There must be bits that are empty still.’

  There was no reasoning with her, they could see. Meekly, they drank their coffee and made their farewells.

  Outside on the pavement, Daniel Palmer had attempted a word of man-to-man worldly deprecation to Cedric Summerson. After all, the woman was his mother, and Summerson was a minister. A bad mother, and a bad minister, but the courtesies must be observed even in extremis. ‘Bit of a Timon’s feast, eh?’ said Daniel, pressing the little battery of his car alarm. His car winked back at him.

  Summerson took it like a man. ‘Impressive woman, your mother,’ he said, with a not very successful attempt at a twinkle. They shook hands on it.

  Summerson walked down the road to his own car. Although he did not know who Timon was, and was never to discover, he knew quite well why he had been summoned. It was her revenge. He hoped the others did not know. He suspected they did not. Clever they might be, but innocent, he guessed. High-minded, ambitious middle-class innocents–except, perhaps, for Nathan. But Nathan had shown no sign of recognition when the words ‘Hot Snax’ had been mentioned. Nathan had probably never represented any product as downmarket, as obscurely and deviously provided, as cheap, as Hot Snax. Nathan was more a Safeway, a Sainsbury man. The trail was not clear. However had Frieda followed it? She was dangerous, as well as impressive. Just as well that she was about to remove herself from society. Just as well that she would, in a court of law, appear as mad as a meat axe. Her testimony was worthless.

  Daniel and Patsy had talked of Frieda’s craziness as they drove home that night. So did Rosemary and Nathan. But David talked of social justice, while Gogo drove and listened. Those three peas, he knew, had infected him, as Frieda had intended that they should. He would never expel their message from his system. Like the princess on her twenty mattresses, he would be tormented. He was susceptible. Frieda had known this, and she had chosen to offer him this torment. He would not reject it.

  ‘In his Utopia,' said David relentlessly,as Gogo drove down the Balls Pond Road at midnight, ‘More proposed that butchers should be recruited, as a punishment, from the criminal classes. You would not expect a good man to become a butcher. Fourier went one further and proposed that all unattractive jobs–all jobs that nobody in their right mind would do without constraint–should be simply abandoned. Society would readjust, he argued. Readjust and do without. Kendrick goes one further still and argues that with any fair system of job allocation any society would choose to be vegetarian. No more abattoirs, no more chicken gutters, no more beefburgers, no more cows’ heads. Bernard Shaw said we could live on pills and air.’

  ‘Shaw was fastidious,’ said Gogo. ‘Like you. Like, it would seem, the reincarnate Frieda.’

  ‘I suppose’, said David, ‘that I’ll have to go and visit an abattoir. She was pointing at one in my constituency, I assume.’

  ‘There’s no need to be so competitive,’ said Gogo, although she knew there was.

  ‘It’s not as though I can’t imagine what’s behind the curtain,’ said David. ‘I know what’s there. That’s why I don’t eat meat anyway.’ ‘Nobody was accusing you,’ said Gogo.

  ‘I accuse myself,’ said David.

  ‘My dear David’, said Gogo, ‘you should never have left the courts of theory. Now you must enter the dirty world. And what of the sewers, what of the untouchables?’

  David put his hand on Gogo’s knees. She pressed it. They were set upon a disastrous course, and, like a good wife, a good politician’s wife, she would try to stand by her man. He would betray her again and again, not with a call girl or an actress or a pretty PA (though who knows, perhaps with them as well, for with his looks how could he not fall into temptation?)–no, he would betray her for Social Justice, that blind blood-boltered maiden.

  David D’Anger is haunted by the fair vision of a just society. She smiles at him. Is this possible, you ask, in the late twentieth century? We concede it was possible for men and women to create, even to believe in such images in the past–as late as the nineteenth century these possibilities lingered–but surely we know better now? We are adult now, and have put away childish things. Dreams survive in academe, at conferences and congresses where students and lecturers and professors still discuss the concept of the fair, the just and the good. But they have no connection with a world of ring-roads and beefburgers, with a world of disease and survival.

  Imagine David D’Anger. You say he is an impossibility, and you cannot imagine him, any more than he can imagine the nature of the revolution which would bring about the world he thinks he wishes to construct. But you are wrong. The truth is that you, for David D’Anger, are the impossibility. The present world which we seem to inhabit is an impossibility. He cannot live at ease in it, he cannot believe it is real. He believes that the other world is possible. He has left the abstract world of reason and entered the public forum. He has hope. He has ambition, but he also has hope. Look at him carefully. Look at him at Timon’s feast in abandoned Romley, in Romley left to its own decay. Look at him a year and a half later at that more palatable meal in preserved and enduring Hampshire. At Frieda’s prompting he has made good use of the intervening time.

  At the age of seventeen, in Guyana, at school in distant Georgetown, David D’Anger read Plato and Aristotle. They blew his mind. Into the hinterland of thought he travelled, to Eldorado. Along rivers, past strange birds, carmine, azure, emerald. Mother of Gold, Scum of Gold. He read Sir Walter Ralegh and dreamt strange dreams. The Guyanese are the chosen people of the Caribbean, and David D’Anger thought himself their chosen son. East and West meet in Guyana, they meet in David D’Anger. Rivers, waterfalls, great iridescent fish. Greeks, Phoenecians, Egyptians. At seventeen he possessed the globe.

  To know the good is to choose it. This is what he learnt. This became clear to him as a boy and it is clear to him now. He would push the button, he would countenance earthquakes. He would rip away the veil from the temple and force us to choose the good. You know such men are dangerous. He knows that an absence of such men is dangerous.

  David D’Anger is headstrong and he believes in himself and his agenda. His certainties have survived e
very success, and he has been successful. If he suffers from folie de grandeur, he has found others who will collude in his folly. Scholar of the year in Georgetown, he was sent to the old country, to study at Oxford. His family, exiled by Burnham, assembled around him. At Oxford he rose, and he continues to rise. He is courted by institutions at home and abroad. Sugar Daddy America and his tin-nippled hard-coiffed Mother Country have both tried to entrap him. Even the many-teated sow of Europe has grunted her overtures. For David D’Anger is a man for whom the time is right. Handsome, clever and black, he is political plausibility personified. His name helps to legitimate many a committee, his presence sanctions many a conference. He can hardly fail to know his worth. Scholarships, fellowships, awards, graces and favours have been dangled before him. Study-centres in grand palazzi on Italian lakes have beckoned him, and so have residencies in distinguished American colleges. (Perhaps there are not yet quite enough clever handsome correct black men to go round?) Even poor Guyana has asked him to return, although she knows she cannot afford him. Choice, whatever Nathan Herz may think, seems to glitter before David with a refracted kaleidoscopic brilliance that would blind a less certain man. But David D’Anger has no intention of being bought or blinded. He thinks he knows where he is going. And if at times there seems to be an ill fit between his grandiose dreams of justice and the bathos of finding himself adopted as a parliamentary candidate for the marginal seat of Middleton in West Yorkshire–well, he tells himself, he is young yet, and uncompromised. He will force a fusion. Everything is going for him. He cannot fail.

  Does his wife Gogo believe in him? Probably. It is hard to tell what she thinks. She has not attempted to check his political ambitions, although she knows that the wives of Members of Parliament are not to be envied. She has her own life, her own career. She does not give much away. She seems to approve his position. She reads some of the books he reads, watches some of the programmes on which he appears. She picks up his references, as we have seen. What more is needed? She is English, she does not show emotion. If she loves both her husband and her son, obsessively, fearfully, you would never guess it. She is the most severe, the most Nordic of Frieda’s offspring. She and David D’Anger make an unlikely, a striking couple, and they know it. David and Grace, the dark sun and the cold moon. One day, she says, she will travel up-country with him to Eldorado.

  In his early days at Oxford, David had been pursued by men, as was to be expected. It was assumed that he would find it diplomatic to surrender. The Master of Gladwyn College himself, a well-known seducer and corrupter of youth, had courted David, and it was widely rumoured that David had succumbed, for the old boy’s manner remained remarkably indulgent over a period of years. Small, vain, preposterous, button-eyed, pursy, plump, treble Sir Roy had petted young David: shaking lingering hands one night after a conversazione, he had murmured, ‘Such a turn on, dear boy, such a turn on!’–alluding, as David took it, to the conjunction of his own smooth dark skin with Sir Roy’s pallid cloistral parchment. This had been at the end of David’s first term. Three years later, having safely survived such favours, David D’Anger had announced his engagement, and old Sir Roy had graced his wedding to Grace ‘Gogo’ Palmer–indeed he had generously held the wedding celebrations in the grounds of his own Lodge. During the course of the party he had pinched David’s arm wistfully and patted his body most intimately: ‘Wisely done, my boy, wisely done,’ he had squeaked, as he winked and peered with lubricious approval at the austerely suited bride, at the flowing jade-green robes of the bride’s stout and eccentric and eminent mother. Had there been some secret pact? Had David D’Anger kissed the arse of the establishment? Nobody knew, or nobody would tell.

  Fourteen years now have they been married, David and Gogo, and they have kept the secrets of their marriage bed. They present a united front. They have but the one child, and they will never have another. He is the pride of their life, the apple of their eye. He is a genius. He has inherited all the talent–and there is much–from both sides of his family. He is heir to great expectations.

  Frieda Haxby had recognized his exceptional qualities at birth. Well, not quite at birth, for she had been in Canada when he was born, and she had not caught an early flight home to be with him. Benjamin was not her first grandchild, nor she a natural granny. Had Gogo resented the delay? If so, she never showed it. One could accuse Frieda of many failings, but not of preferring her first-born son Daniel to her two daughters. She treated all with equal inconsistency–scattering favours when it suited her, not when it suited the recipient. Until she saw Benjamin. And then things changed. Or so Gogo thought she noted.

  Benjamin was six weeks old when Frieda finally made her way to the D’Angers’ untidy basement flat in Highbury. Lying in Gogo’s arms, he had stared at Frieda, with his large dark long-lashed seducer’s eyes, and he had smiled at her, as charmingly as he had smiled at his Guyanese grandmother. And she had smiled at him. ‘The divine child,’ she said. ‘Oh, the divine child.’ And Gogo and David had smiled at one another proudly, for they too knew that he was the divine child, he was the darling saviour of the world. They had been amazed by the ferocity of their passion for this perfect infant.

  And Frieda had reached out her arms and taken the baby, and he had lain there on her bosom in gracious ease, nestling comfortably, tightening his little fingers round her smooth amber beads. She had walked him up and down the room, singing over him, droning, as she had sung intermittently to her own children. An incantation, a strange, rhythmic, tuneless keening. 'Il est né, le divin enfant, Chantons tous son événement,’ she had spontaneously, inappropriately, blasphemously chanted, as she paced up and down the stripped floorboards, patting the child’s round blue cocooned elasticated bottom in time to the beat of the song.

  Later, she put on her reading glasses to inspect his face more closely: Benjamin caught at the gold chain from which she suspended them. She read his face, and he read hers. ‘Benjamin,’ she said to him appraisingly, ‘you are the youngest child of Israel, Benjamin. You are the child of War, you are the warrior babe. You are Beltenebros, the Beautiful Obscure.’ Who can tell what the child hears? He takes in everything. Has Frieda put a spell upon him, like the wicked godmother?

  Gogo will have no more children, for, with the birth of Benjamin, she suffered a prolapse. She wears a metal ring within her. She tells nobody of this, not even her sister or her friends. The ring is her secret. David knows. It keeps her chaste and faithful to David, but does it compel his fidelity to her, or does it release him? She asks no questions, to be told no lies. She does not want to lose David.

  David is unfaithful to her with her mother, or so she suspects. And she is right to be suspicious. For years, Frieda has wooed and tempted David. She has sent him notes and postcards, to his college address, to his television address, occasionally to his home address. Now she sends him messages from her castle by the sea. Frieda Haxby knows David’s ambitions. She has cast herself as his Lady Macbeth. She knows what tempts him.

  LUNCH ON THE LAWN

  The morning after the Aga evening, the Sunday morning, Patsy Palmer rises early, unstacks the dishwasher, lays plates and beakers and jams on the table for breakfast, washes a couple of lettuces, puts a casserole of beans and bacon in the bottom Aga, feeds the dog and the cats, sweeps up the remains of a mangled rabbit and throws it out among the nasturtiums, waters the plants, and wonders if she is crazy. Why does she do all this? What is she trying to prove? She is off to Meeting in Hartley Bessborough, some ten miles away, to commune with a God that she suspects does not exist, to ponder her sins which do, to worry about her mother (for she has a mother, the Palmers are not the only family with a mother, though you wouldn’t know this if you Listened to them, as she is obliged to do) and to pick up, on her way back, Judge Partington and his wife, who are coming to lunch. (Judge Partington has crashed his car into the back of his own garage and is temporarily off the road.)

  Patsy yawns, combs her hair, smiles at herself,
and eats a slice of toast. She is satisfied with herself and her sins. And she is looking forward to an hour of silence, away from her in-laws. Thank God none of them is religious. It would be the last straw if any of them said they wanted to come to Meeting with her. (Nathan had accompanied her once, out of curiosity. The silence had nearly driven him mad. He had heaved and breathed in restless misery, listening to the rude noise of his own treacherous guts. Never again, he had moaned, upon release.)

  Simon and Emily sleep on, as Patsy sets off across the countryside. But David and Daniel are out in the garden, strolling on the lawn, talking men’s talk. Gogo and Rosemary watch them from the upstairs-landing window. The Virginia creeper coils its little tender tendrils inwards into the house. The corpse of a small bird lies in the creeper’s nestwork, staring up at them from dead eyes and open beak. Gogo and Rosemary do not see it, for they are watching their menfolk. David has hooked his thumbs alertly in his pockets, Daniel’s hands are clasped gravely behind his back.

  ‘Daniel’s hair’s getting very thin,’ says Rosemary, after studying him for a few moments.

  ‘So’s mine,’ says Gogo, patting her headscarf. ‘It’s the Haxby genes. You seem to have got Palmer hair.’

  ‘Who knows what Palmer hair looks like?’ asks Rosemary, and they both laugh.

  ‘Benjie’s lucky. David has good hair,’ says Rosemary. ‘And in the right place too. On top of his head.’

  ‘There are some advantages in marrying a wog,’ says Gogo.

  David and Daniel are discussing weightier matters than hair loss. Daniel is professing a cultivated ignorance in the face of David’s description of a seminar on Cultural Appropriation which is to be held in Calgary in October. David has been invited to attend, and is not sure whether to accept. Daniel has followed with interest David’s update of the slow progress of the trade-name dispute on Demerara, which threatens to involve some large agrofood businesses, but the phrase ‘Cultural Appropriation’ is, he claims, a new one on him. He wrinkles his nose fastidiously, his eyes crinkle into the dryest of dry smiles: like High Court judges who feign innocence of the existence of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, he feigns ignorance of Canada’s leading role in the debate on communitarianism and ethnic minorities. Quebec he has heard of and admits to, but he disclaims any knowledge of the native minorities and their anti-Quebecois stance, and as for the notion that a white man cannot write about or represent in court a black or brown man, or vice versa–well, it leaves him gobsmacked. ‘Gobsmacked,’ repeats Daniel delicately. (He has picked up some contemporary phrases from his children, and uses them occasionally, in ‘scare quotes’, in a manner that he hopes is endearing. It works quite well in court.) ‘Are you telling me that a person can only represent or speak for that category of person which he or she happens to be? Isn’t that rather restrictive?’