The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  He had been interested to learn that David D’Anger was, like himself, a vegetarian. He almost wishes he had plucked up courage and come down to say hello, instead of skulking up there with his tranny and his earplugs, instead of eavesdropping down the backstairs. He would have liked to have heard more of that conversation about the Veil of Ignorance. He had eavesdropped through most of David’s exposition of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice as Parlour Game, and had spent much of the night pondering its implications, wondering if he too, like Nathan, would give it a whirl and go for change. On the whole, he thinks not. He’s been pretty lucky, most ways, and has a lot to lose. Being born in Wolverhampton in 1969 had been a cushy number compared with some. Look at those poor buggers in Rwanda. Africa was a fuck-up, man. He couldn’t credit some of" the rubbish he heard, from Afro-Brits, about their African roots. He could just about get his mind as far as Jamaica, and one day he’d go there, one day he’d go and see where he came from, but as for going all the way back again, back through history, back to Africa and the bush and the jungle–no way. The buck’s got to stop somewhere. Americans are barmy, Africa’s full of murderous violent bastards. You can see them on TV. Give me Wolverhampton, give me Stoke Newington.

  But of course no one will give him either Wolverhampton or Stoke Newington. They won’t give him anything. When Patsy Palmer chucks him out, as he knows she will, as he knows she must, he has nowhere in the wide world to go. He has nowhere and nobody. He bites his lip, throws the last fleshy integument on to its ripped and slaughtered fellows, and wipes his hands on his trousers. How has he come to this? How has he, a nice chap like him, ended up in such dire, such lost, such hopeless loneliness? He knows he is nice-looking, but he does not fancy the blokes that fancy him. Sex unnerves him, he cannot do it. He’s frightened of the big boys, the big-time. He’s willing to work, but what can he do, who will employ him? Will Patsy be able to help? Has she a plan for him? He looks at her, as she plunges the last batch of blanched beans into iced water, and tries to read her face. Can she be trusted? Does she know how to help, beyond this room, beyond this small daily task?

  She catches him looking at her, returns from her own thoughts to him, smiles, says briskly, rather too loudly, as though to a public meeting, ‘Well done, Will. You’re an ace. Be an angel, take the shells out to the compost for me, and the other compost bucket, while you’re at it. Five pounds at least, I’d say, wouldn’t you?’

  No, she does not know how to help.

  He picks up the basket and the bucket, and goes out through the back door, past the gumboots and walking sticks and dog dishes, and down the track to the vegetable garden. He wonders how he would make out if he had been born in Jamaica. If he had been born in this house. If he had been born in China. If he were to win the lottery. Would he still be himself, Will Paine?

  He tips out the eggshells, the beanpods, the burnt toast, the potato peelings, the wilted lettuce. The leavings of the feast. In America, he has heard say, they throw out more food a day than Africa consumes in a month. If you don’t eat what’s on the table in an American restaurant it gets trashed, even if it’s still in its cellophane wrapper. That’s what he’s heard.

  He doesn’t want to live on leftovers for the rest of his life. He wishes he could push a button and send the whole lot spinning round. Level the food mountains, let the wine lakes flow to the sea. He’s heard tell of a computer game, where instead of killing monsters or rescuing maidens you could cause famines and gluts. You could play with the distribution of the earth’s resources. You could make the desert blossom and parch the rain forest. What would happen, he wondered, if you spread everything thinly and absolutely evenly and gave everyone a bit of everything? Was that what Emily had been hinting at?

  He shakes his head. He knows his brain does not work well. It is undeveloped, and he has messed it up with hash, for only when he is high does he feel less than utterly alone. People tell him his IQ is fine, but he knows better. In prison he had started an O-Level course or two, to fill in the time, but he knows he has no staying power. He bends like a reed. His mind bends. He is pliant, suppliant. These English, they are bred to hold on, like terriers. They hold on to their own interests even while they smile and offer shelter. Nothing will dislodge them.

  He wonders if Patsy is right to put teabags in the compost. Are they biodegradable? He pokes the decaying mess with a garden fork, levels it, pats it down, conscientiously abstracts a cigarette butt, which certainly should not be there, drops it in the blue plastic bucket called Lucy.

  David D’Anger is a traitor. He has joined the English. So says Will Paine to himself, as he walks back to the house. But he doesn’t believe it. David D’Anger is a lucky man, that’s all, a lucky man with staying power. You can see his mind follow through. Beware of envy, says Will Paine to himself, envy’s a killer. He has seen it kill.

  It’s not right, that he should nurse this aching solitude. True, Simon and Emily speak to him, Patsy speaks to him, even Daniel sometimes nods at him. But they don’t rate him, any more than they rate their poor dumb dog. And they’re not all that nice to the dog. He’s seen Simon kick the dog.

  As Daniel, Patsy, Emily and Will Paine eat their friendly Sunday supper of cheese on toast, Frieda Haxby is scrambling in her Wellington boots over the slanting slate-grey black and purple rocks, clutching a fossil hammer and a kitchen knife. She is after the mussels. She treads with care on the living pebble-dash of limpets and barnacles, for she has just had a narrow escape on her own staircase: she had put her foot through what seemed to be a new cavity, and had saved herself only by clutching the not-so-solid-fake-Jacobean banister. She had cursed herself: that pretty little estate agent, fluffy Amanda Posy from Taunton, had warned her about the stairs, had told her she’d need to get them seen to. (Amanda Posy had not believed that anyone would ever buy Ashcombe. Who could want such a gloomy monstrosity? People only looked around it for a giggle. But Frieda had not been the giggling type.)

  Frieda, in her youth and middle age, had been deep into cultural appropriation, into appropriation of every kind. She had appropriated middle-class education, manners, accent; she had appropriated her sister’s admirer; she had appropriated a middle-class husband. Then she had moved on to colonize Canada, Australia, Sweden, various campuses in the United States and, through her son-in-law and grandson, Guyana. She had meddled with them all, with insatiable anthropological curiosity. But now her empire was in decline, it had shrunk to this barren strand, this rotting folly, these dark wooded acres, this sunless kingdom by a sunless sea. Frieda Haxby, booted and skirted, picks her way towards the mussel beds. She carries a plastic bucket. She is watched by three crows. They are a faithful three. She knows them well.

  The weather has brightened. To the east the swagged clouds are heavy and swollen, but above her opens a bright-edged ragged baroque space of the purest, clearest virgin blue, from which might descend an angel, a grace, a dove. Arrows of golden light pierce from a hidden source, the curtains tinge with pink. Frieda’s castle faces north, and the sun leaves her coast early; its sinking rays stream backwards, towards the brow of the moor.

  Frieda pauses for a moment, steadies herself, and gazes at the rent gap in the sky, as it widens and pulses itself open like a great sacred heavenly heart. It reminds her of one of the new paintings she has bought, her new Leland, which still stands in the damp, its face to the wall. She has been naughty with her paintings. They will be ruined if she does not hang them, but she is afraid that if she knocks picture hooks into her peeling walls her house will fall down. Leland paints blue-clay earth and skies of terracotta and salmon pink and crushed rose, and from the raw mines of his clay crawl the blobbed and cellular forms of life. He paints evolution.

  She must hang the paintings one of these days, she resolves. They cost many thousands of pounds. She is a patron of the arts.

  She reaches the mussels and starts to prize them from their lodgings. The mussels are stubborn, but so is she. Slowly she fills her b
ucket. Not much lives on this shoreline, for it is too stony, but some forms of simple seashore life have colonized it. Brilliant orange lichens, periwinkles, anemones. Further west, there are crabs and lobsters. Cancer pagurus, Homarus vulgaris, Palinurus vulgaris. A wash of leathery bladder wrack and thong weed, a sprouting of small succulents with stiff white and dry pink flowers–the common scurvy grass, she thinks, though it is much prettier than its name. On the salt marshes to the east samphire grows, and she has seen there several times on her wanderings a lone white egret, fishing far from home. What wind had blown it here, so far off course?

  Palinurus drowned. Or was he hacked to death by pirates? She cannot recall.

  She tries not to break the mussels, but from time to time her knife slips. Her hands are bleeding, but they are too cold to feel the pain. Blood and sea-salt mingle. She hacks, and curses. She has broken a mussel shell, and its living body is exposed. She pulls it away from its rock and a lump of its flesh seems to leap from its crushed dwelling place and attach itself like a leech to her bare and bleeding hand. Horrified, she tries to brush off the clinging fragment, but it sticks. It is fierce and hopeful. It will not die. Its flesh seeks a home on her flesh. She scrapes it off with the knife, and it falls vanquished on to the pale purple rock. The mussels in the bucket breathe and sigh. Frieda the murderer turns her back upon the sea, and climbs up the hill.

  THE VALLEY OF ROCKS

  For the rest of the summer no news comes out of Exmoor. Frieda Haxby is silent. David D’Anger received a postcard from her in late July, with notes on the subsidy-sheep scandal of Somerset and Devon, with information about a new Japanese protein-producing fungus, but it did not require an answer and gave no address. It was posted in Exeter, so either she or some minion of hers is mobile. David has been appointed her conscience: he knows that she expects him to carry on her abandoned work as fleshthorn and neckpain, that she derides his squeamish emollience, his desire to please. But he does not see why he should take on the subsidy sheep of the West Country. There are none, as far as he knows, in West Yorkshire. He cannot take on the whole of the British Isles at her command. He has visited an abattoir, at her prompting, and he will never recover from the horror of it. Does she endorse or deplore the Japanese fungus? It is not clear from her card, which portrays, on its pictorial side, a view of the small church of Oare where Lorna Doone was shot by Carver Doone at the altar. (What is Lorna Doone, David asks Gogo. She enlightens him.)

  Does Frieda Haxby have a postal address, a postcode? The house is called Ashcombe, a dull suburban name for what Rosemary has described as a grand Gothic folly, but Rosemary has insisted that it is beyond the reach of any postman’s beat. Maybe Frieda collects letters from a box nailed to a tree at the end of the drive? Maybe she drives into the nearest village to pick up her mail? The house is marked on the Ordnance Survey Map, so it must exist. But Frieda has fallen silent. Neither light nor sound emerge from her remote planet.

  Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary are too busy with the complications of their own lives to think about her much, but occasionally they are reminded of her existence. Silly-Season reports of a sheep-savaging Black Beast on the moor–a puma, a panther?–give rise to sardonic speculation. It would be just like Frieda to get herself involved with a Beast. Perhaps she is the Beast. Another story, about tragic deaths in a dinghy off the Island of Lundy, makes Daniel and Patsy reach for their map, for this, they know, is Frieda’s coastline. They look at the swirling frills of steep brown-green contour on the OS map, at the marks of the Roman Fortlet and the Old Barrow and the farm called Desolate.

  None of them knows the West Country well, though all have touched upon it and passed through it: now they turn the pages of their papers and read of stag hunts, of hunt saboteurs, of water pollution, of fires in nuclear-power stations, of an outbreak of meningitis in Taunton–is the virus spreading south and westwards from Stroud? And was it in Taunton that Frieda had seen the photograph of Ashcombe in the estate agent’s window? They think it was. It was in Taunton that she had run to earth the story of the meatless hamburger, which had caused David D’Anger to take up the unpleasant scent in his adopted constituency of Middleton. Taunton has much to answer for.

  Occasional inquiries about Frieda reach Daniel and Patsy, David and Gogo, Rosemary and Nathan. Friends, acquaintances, colleagues, visiting Americans, visiting Australians, visiting Swedes: none of them seems to know where she is. The tone of some is reproachful. This, they agree, must be part of Frieda’s plot. She has forced them into the role of Bad Children, and wilfully, playfully, cast herself as a Neglected Mother. They hope that most of those who ask after her know her well enough to discount this storyline. Her agent surely must. Her agent Cate Crowe had telephoned Rosemary to say that to her astonishment she had had some interest in the film rights of Christina from some Australian crackpot, and although there would be nothing in it (how could there be?) (well, maybe a few thousand quid at most?) she felt it her duty to pass it on. But although she had written to Ashcombe, no answer had been received. Did Rosemary know if Frieda had a telephone down there? Or a fax? Had Rosemary any idea of what the woman thought she was up to? Rosemary, not best pleased to be reminded of the embarrassing débâcle of Christina, yet anxious to keep on the right side of the powerful Cate Crowe, had muffled and waffled her reply about access to Frieda. But she had divulged that her sister Grace would be going down there in late August or early September on a visit. Grace would relay any messages. And Rosemary had rung Gogo and David, to tell them that they must contact Cate Crowe before they headed westwards.

  So David and Gogo, during the summer months, collected and listed topics for Frieda. They even wrote themselves an agenda, afraid that the disruptive power of Frieda’s presence and the inhospitable extremity of her retreat would, if ever they reached her, scatter their programme to the high winds.

  They would tackle Frieda on the subjects of her health, her electricity supply, the safety of her premises, and the wisdom of contemplating a winter beneath the moor. (The floorboards, according to Rosemary, were dodgy.) If it seemed possible, they would raise the subject of her will. They would take a package of letters and contracts and German Income Tax Release Forms from Cate Crowe, and provide a courier service for anyone else who wished to send communications to be delivered into her hand.

  This, of course, depended on her willingness to receive them. What if they arrived there and were shown the door? What if she set the dogs on them?

  Neither David nor Gogo thought that this would happen. They considered that they would prove more tactful and acceptable visitors than the worldly and impatient Rosemary, who had arrived unannounced and no doubt on high-heels and smelling of Ysatis. The D’Angers would approach in better camouflage. Moreover they would carry with them the talismanic figure of grandson Benjamin, who had always seemed close to her heart. Who could close a door against Benjamin? He had the key to all castles. So they fondly believed.

  They encouraged Benjamin to take an interest in their projected outing, and he, a quick and scholarly child, responded eagerly, though he drew the line at reading Lorna Doone. They consulted him about the route, and at once agreed when he expressed a desire to see Stonehenge. Of course he could see Stonehenge, and he could also visit the Valley of Rocks. Would he like to see Wookey Hole and stalactites and stalagmites and Cheddar Gorge? Yes, he said, he would.

  Benjamin was excited about the thought of entering a deep cave. He went to the library and took out books on pot-holes, and studied the diary of the man who set the record for spending time alone underground. The world’s largest cave chamber is in the Gunong Mulu National Park in Sarawak, the largest underwater cave is in Mexico, and the largest cave system in Britain is the Ease Gill system in Yorkshire.

  Benjamin read about Wookey Hole. In 1935 the caves had been explored with the help of breathing apparatus by a team led by Gerald Balcombe. There was one woman in the party, Penelope Powell, and she had described descending into ‘a world of green
, where the water was as clear as crystal. Imagine a green jelly, where even the shadows cast by the pale green boulders are green but of a deeper hue; as we advanced, light green mud rose knee high and then fell softly and gently into the profound green-ness behind. So still, so silent, unmarked by the foot of man since the river came into being, awe inspiring though not terrifying, it was like being in some mighty and invisible presence...’

  Benjamin looked up fiction about caves and tunnels on the computer index in the library. He read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and even Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He dreamt of caves. One night he dreamt that he was travelling through tunnels that transfixed the earth: if he went onwards, he would emerge in Guyana, in the green-gold of his own land, where there were waterfalls higher than the eye can see, and chasms deeper than man or woman could fathom. In these tunnels beneath the earth a high wind raged perpetually, a source of unharnessed subterrestrial power far mightier than the winds of heaven which turned the silver mills of the wind field on the ridge behind his Uncle Daniel’s false Old Farm.