The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘And the injunction holds?’

  ‘Of course it holds,’ says Partington, munching away, his teeth spattered with a white spew of chewed wet nut. ‘I’ll fix them. I was at Magdalen with Champer. I’ll teach him about human dignity. Dick, I said, I challenge you, you show your bare bum on TV, and we’ll let it run. You do a bum shot to introduce it, and I’ll see what I can do for you. Fair’s fair, I said. Do unto others. I’ve seen his bum, and I can tell you it’s not a pretty sight.’

  ‘So what will happen?’

  ‘We’ll see on Monday,’ says Bill Partington, grinning broadly and reaching out his paw for more nuts, but at that moment Patsy appears at a window, a cordless telephone in her hand, and calls, ‘Bill! Bill! It’s for you.’

  He heaves himself up, stumps across the paving stones, leans across the flowerbed, grabs the phone. He yells into it. All of them hear every word. ‘Eh? What? The I BA? The High Court? The Minister? What the fuck are you talking about, you arsehole? Ah, come off it, you bum. Fair’s fair. You wait, lover boy. You wait. I’ve known Reggie since I was a boy. You’ll get no change out of him. Eh? What?’

  As his unseen interlocutor manages to arrest the flow, Bill paces expansively along the terrace, groaning loudly, and listening with pantomime impatience. He starts to tear at the ragged remains of what had once been a fair crop of brown curls. Then he breaks in again with, ‘You swine! You bum!’

  Celia, her long brown legs neatly crossed at the ankles beneath her pretty soft hemline, rolls her eyes to the almost cloudless sky, and sighs in disassociation. Daniel smiles with undisguised delight. Nathan too is much pleased. Rosemary pretends to be reading a Sunday colour supplement, David buries his head in his hands, and Gogo rises to her feet and disappears into the house. Tennis guest Julian tries to start up a conversation with Daniel, but Daniel does not even notice: Julian is not bad at tennis but his views on anything other than opera are simply not worth listening to, and he wants to hear the end of Bill’s tirade.

  It comes abruptly, as the outraged dignitary yells a final oath of defiance, and presses the off button. He slams the phone down on the inner window-ledge (thereby dislodging, though he does not notice this, a small vase of sweet peas). He returns to his chair, gleaming with the heat of battle, slumps down again, and says, ‘Hope you enjoyed the cabaret!’ Then he appears to fall into a sullen reverie, from which Daniel as host feels, after a moment or two, obliged to rescue him.

  ‘Trouble, eh?’ he suggests delicately. Bill Partington surfaces, blowing like a sea monster, and re-engages. He tries to explain the legal technicalities of the injunction, the legal technicalities with which Dick Champer seeks to thwart him, but the moment is past, and Daniel manages to divert him to other, less contumaceous matters.

  Is it a form of retaliation that brings the demure Celia Partington to raise the subject of Frieda Haxby over the beans and bacon? She has read a piece somewhere during the last week or two–she cannot remember where, was it in a magazine, the Spectator perhaps? about the fall-out from Frieda’s VAT dispute. It seems that any victory she had claimed had been Pyrrhic, that new regulations were being drawn up to prevent further defences along the lines she had pursued. The grey area was being made light, to the taxman’s advantage. ‘Not always wise to challenge, is it?’ suggests Celia. ‘Even when one’s morally in the right.’

  None of them answers. Celia pursues.

  ‘And is she still up on Exmoor? Has she any plans to return?’ she innocently asks. ‘Will you be visiting her this summer?’

  Solidly the Palmers close ranks. Not a treacherous murmur escapes them. Frieda on Exmoor is as happy as can be, they all agree. Rosemary has been down to see her recently. The house is too large, but beautifully situated. Frieda is taking her time to do it up, but it will be splendid when it is finished. David and Gogo are off to see her next month. They’re looking forward to it.

  ‘We’re hoping she’ll invite us all for Christmas,’ says Nathan wickedly. Rosemary sniggers, Gogo looks severe, Daniel opens another bottle of Bulgarian, and Bill Partington belches, loudly, and pats his stained shirt front. The children have disappeared into the shrubbery. The man in the attic has come down to become the man in the garden shed. He too eats beans, shyly.

  It is raining on Exmoor. Frieda Haxby Palmer sits in one of the many derelict rooms that look towards the sea, and listens to the rain on the roof. In better days this had been a garden room, where cream teas had been served. She cannot see the sea and the black rocks below, for rain obscures the steep combes. She can see only broken paving and the lawn and the abandoned flowerbeds and nettles and dodder and brambles. She has been out walking and now she dries her bare feet in front of a paraffin stove. (Rosemary had been right. It is wet here even in midsummer. It is almost always wet.) A wet dog dries by her side, and a pigeon sits at her feet in an upturned saucepan lid.

  It is not a scene to comfort an anxious or a proud daughter. The room is full of junk. Suitcases, cardboard boxes, packing cases. Books and papers lie open on an old billiard table, on moth-eaten green-baize card-tables salvaged from the building’s hotel life. On one, a game of clock patience is laid out, half played and abandoned. On a heavy mock-Jacobean sideboard stand three skulls, two animal (a badger and a sheep?) and one human. Their grim effect is softened by a cracked red Bristol glass vase holding a peacock feather, a skeleton clock in a glass case, and a large alabaster egg–a nature morte, not a shrine or a cemetery. Paintings stand on the floor, their faces to the wall against the skirting board, their canvas backs and their labels of provenance exposed. Next to the alabaster egg lies a brown dried orange pierced at a shallow angle by a bone knitting needle. Now who would wish to torture an orange?

  Frieda has been out walking this morning to Pollock Wood. She walks in all weathers. The dog, Bounce, has followed her. He is not her dog, but he goes where she goes. Old, black and white, shabby, disreputable, Bounce suits her well. Now he stinks and dries.

  Beyond Turgot Common, on the upland, Frieda and Bounce had spotted a dying calf. It was lying in a ditch by a hedge. Its mother was standing near by, watching it and them without any expression of interest. The cow was big, brown, swollen. The calf was a pale dun pink, a naked skinny pink. It kept rearing and lifting its round ugly head from the sodden grass, then letting it slump down again, as though it were too heavy for its neck. Should she let the farmer now? She thought not. The farmer would not care. This much her hamburger research–the research which had brought her to this ditch–had taught her. Farmers do not care. And she did not like the farmer. She did not like his thrumming generator, his barbed wire, his piles of old tyres, his heaps of slurry. Let the calf die in the wet. Bounc e had lowered his head, laid back his ears. Bounce put in no plea for the calf.

  They had descended then, Frieda and Bounce, into Tippett’s Wood, where they had seen a creature yet more dreadful than the calf. It was a sheep. Its matted pelt hung off it in lumps to trail upon the ground. Its wool was yellow-white, and it was stained with blotches of rusty red, the dirty dull red of dried menstrual blood. Its face was thin and shorn and quivering, its body shapeless beneath its ragged outgrowths. It gazed at the woman and the dog in misery. It was the sheep of affliction, the sheep of God. It gazed at them knowingly, then gazed away again. The dog whimpered with a slight fear. The woman stared back, recognizing it, recognizing herself. The scape sheep. It abandoned hope, and limped away, hobbling painfully slowly into the bracken, on its sodden footrot hoofbones. A rotten sheep, a subsidy sheep. The hillside rang with noisy water, and high overhead a yellow Wessex rescue helicopter buzzed, on its way to search for lost travellers.

  Frieda walked on through the ancient woodland. It spoke to her of decay, her own decay. The trees were encrusted with lichen, and small ferns sprouted from them, as orchids sprout from the trees of a tropical rain forest. Fungus grew from living holes and dying trunks and dead logs. Grey-white oyster outcrops clustered. Ash, birch, oak and thorn, the old trees of Northern
Europe. Some leant from the steep slope at perilous angles, and others were uprooted, reaching their inverted crowns into the air like great matted discs of red ogre hair, of monstrous curling fibre. Twisted faces peered at her from severed, scarred and stunted limbs. She passed the hollow tree, inside which stood a small lake on which a miniature elfin armada might sail. Scale was crazily distorted in this wracked and rent, this Rackham woodland. There was an overpowering smell of rich wet damp and decay. Stumps rose through the leafmould like old teeth. Frieda’s tongue joggled her bridgework, and from beneath her loose bridge an acrid, bitter taste seeped into her mouth. It was the taste of death.

  Then she had walked back to her fortress, the wet dog following, and now she sits there, amidst the spoils and bones of her history. She listens to the rain. It drums and drums, it ebbs then it strengthens, it gusts, it pours in heavy chains of water from the eves, it hangs in great drops on the salt-smeared window-pane. It pours and pours, but her eyes are dry. The sky weeps for her.

  What is she doing here in her cavern? Well might her children wonder, well might the estate agent and the hamburger men have wondered. Chance had brought her but she has found a correspondence here, and here she has settled, to write her memoirs. Of course she is writing her memoirs. All her friends are writing their memoirs. At her age there is nothing much left to write, or so she might tell herself. (She is not as old as she pretends. She likes to meet disasters halfway, to get them over with.) She sits here, and addresses herself to her final questioning, her last revenge. This must be clear, she believes, even to her dim-witted family. She is here to summon her mother, her father, her sister, her husband from their graves and from their hiding places. As the Witch of Endor raised Samuel to terrify Saul, so she, the Witch of Exmoor, will raise Gladys Haxby, Ernest Haxby, Hilda Haxby, Andrew Palmer. Her nice clean ambitious well-educated offspring will be appalled by their hideous ancestry.

  The problems with writing one’s memoirs, she has discovered, include not only libel but also the unreliability of memory, the tedium of research. She has so little to go on. One of the vital scraps of evidence she herself burnt, long ago and, she suspects, criminally. There is not much documentation of the Haxbys. One of the attractive aspects of Queen Christina’s life had been the careful documentation. Naturally Frieda had not really thought herself to be a reincarnation of Christina (nor in any way descended from her–the Haxbys came from Denmark, not Sweden, as any fool could work out, and anyway Christina was largely of German blood), but nevertheless she now thinks that her perverse and arbitrary obsession with this seventeenth-century monarch must have led her to this, her final quest. Well, she intends it to be her final quest. She is sick of everything and everyone, herself included, herself above all, and she can’t see herself embarking on any new ventures after this. After this, she’ll let others inherit the chaos.

  Christina has given her a good run for her money, and Frieda had enjoyed her company. Frieda had followed Christina, from cauled and hairy birth through arrogant girlhood, through sexual ambiguity and intellectual experiment, through free thinking and strategic conversions, through disguises and masquerades, to her old age in the Palazzo Riario in Rome. Frieda had followed her curious attachment to Descartes, which had in a manner killed him, and she had invented (evidence being lacking) a relationship with her French ambassador Grotius, who had once escaped from prison in a box of books, and who died by shipwreck in her service. There had been much fun to be had with Christina in the colourful, swashbuckling, wide-gesturing seventeenth century, but her readers had not shared the fun, and had completely missed her subtle subtext on the theme of powerlessness and power. Not a single reviewer had even noted, let alone approved, her complex contrasting of the fates of Christina and her illiterate maid. Oh well, so what? ‘I care for nobody, no, not I,’ sang Frieda tunelessly to her dog Bounce, ‘I care for nobody, no, not I, if nobody cares for me.’ And the visit to Rome (legitimate research, all expenses offset against tax) had been most enjoyable. No wonder Christina had turned to Rome. It’s a fine city.

  Frieda had not been lying when she told the disc jockey, between tracks of UB40 and the Wreckers, that she had been moved to think herself in touch with Christina. Late at night, in the Mausoleum, she had had strange fancies. And here, on Exmoor, she has them too. Who is to say that one cannot put oneself in touch with an ancestral past? Her forebears had come across the North Sea from somewhere, as her mother had never tired of boasting, to settle in the flat lands.

  Many times she had been to Sweden before Christina attracted her. She has had a long relationship with the country. Sweden had welcomed and honoured her. She had written of its iron workers in a study that had been much praised. And she had once, long ago, been in love with a Swede. They had sailed amongst the little islands together through one fine week of summer, and eaten crayfish on the shore. He had told her she was an honorary Swede, being possessed, as he was, by those famous national characteristics, selflove and love of solitude. He had also worn a dashing small moustache.

  The documentation of Christina’s life had been picked over by generation after generation of scholars. Her iconography–Christina as Minerva, Christina ruling Parnassus, Christina as Pallas of the North–had provided food for dozens of art historians. Her relationship with the beautiful Belle Sparre, the tragic widow, her bedfellow and confidante, had been subjected to pages of analysis, and so had her feelings for the blond, handsome and moustached Magnus de la Gardie. Had she been in love with him, or with her successor, Charles Gustavus? Each letter, each seal, each tapestry, each painting in her collection, each binding of each book had been catalogued and examined through microscopes. Even her grave-clothes and her decomposed body had been exhumed and interrogated. The epaulets and buttonholes, the embroidered cross, the silver mask, the deformed shoulder, the decomposed fibulae, the silk taffeta buskins and the grave-gloves.

  Christina had been buried in a gown of white silk with a gold fringe. And the story went that in 1688, on the Christmas Eve before her death, Christina had tried on this new gown, watched by her last late love and protegee, the singer Angelica Giorgini. And an old wise woman who happened to be there at the same time, as wise women often are in such stories, said to her, ‘Madame, you will be buried in that dress not long from now.’ And so it had come to pass. Christina had died next spring.

  Yes, Frieda Haxby had grown fond of Christina, who preferred flat men’s shoes and short jackets to white silk, who loved the storm and feared the calm, yet who ended her days peacefully chewing chestnuts with the cook in her Roman kitchen. Occasionally, of a night, when the wind blows (and here it can blow) she fancies she hears the strains of Scarlatti and the clear pure voices of Angelica Giorgini and her sister Barbara, as they sing to the old queen amidst the scent of jasmine. Sehnsucht nach Süde, Sehnsucht nach Norde.

  As it happens, Frieda Haxby can hear Scarlatti whenever she chooses. The Giorgini sisters and Christina are three centuries dead, but Frieda has Scarlatti on compact disc.

  The mortal remains and documentary leavings of Gladys and Ernie Haxby are, in contrast to those of Queen Christina, sparse. Ernest Haxby had been cremated, with a minimum of ceremony; the indifferent functionary had, to Gladys’s indignation, got Ernie’s name wrong. He had gone to his long home under the name of Edward Haxby. And he hadn’t been allowed the hymn he’d always wanted either: he’d often spoken in praise of ‘We plough the fields and scatter’, but Gladys and the functionary were agreed that this was a harvest hymn and unsuitable for a spring send-off. God alone knows what Gladys had done with Ernie’s ashes, but Frieda herself had broadcast those of the mother in the small garden at Chapel Street, amongst the seeding cabbages. She had dug them in with a trowel and stamped on them with a Wellington boot. The cottage had been sold. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to write her memoirs in her birthplace, but Frieda had not been able to face such flat psychic hardship. She prefers it here, by the sea. But she has brought boxes of papers, and
those she will, in her own good time, if she can bear it, examine.

  Is this desire to write her memoirs a desire for revenge, or a desire to salvage her own self? She is not sure.

  She remembers one of her last visits to her mother, in Dry Bendish. Herself a woman in her late fifties, her mother in her late seventies, in fair health but poor spirits. Ernie was long dead, dead of a series of strokes brought on by overwork: he had been the deferential farm labourer, cap in hand, put upon by all and sundry. Whereas Gladys, as she had frequently remarked, thought herself equal to the best in the land. ‘Put upon by all and sundry’, ‘equal to the best in the land’. This had been the ditty, this the refrain, spun out remorselessly over the decades. Frieda stands there, in the small hot room that smells of hair, dust, mice and stale biscuits. Her mother talks and talks. Frieda, the tea-tray in her hand, the door ajar, is awash with tea. She is longing to go to the lavatory, her bladder is weak and grows weaker with age. This time Gladys defeats her. Frieda, standing listening to her mother, transfixed by the unceasing flow of complaints about a husband dead, neighbours disloyal, shopkeepers dishonest and life disappointing, finds that she has wet her knickers. Warm wet urine seeps through her black John Lewis elastic knickers and her black fifteen-denier cornershop tights. Urine runs down her thigh. Desperately Frieda tightens her pelvic muscles, arrests the stream. But her mother’s flow continues. Gladys had boasted, still boasts, that her babies were dry by the age of one, but Frieda knows that this was a he. Frieda is not dry yet. A 5 5-year-old professional woman bullied into incontinence in a reversal of roles, in a perverse and sadistic seizure of power. Does her mother know what she has done? Does she know of this hidden humiliation? Please, Miss, please Miss Haxby, may I be excused?