The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  An inky flood of sad regret flows upwards through the stranded body of Grace D’Anger, and tears fill her eyes. Her husband folds her in his arms and rocks her quietly. She is beyond his reach, and he loves her. But she cannot return.

  (Grace D’Anger’s suspicions about her sister Rosemary’s marriage are, as you will have noted at once, quite false. Rosemary Palmer married Nathan Herz for sex. Anyone but Grace D’Anger would have spotted that. The suspicions reveal more about Grace than they do about Rosemary.

  Her speculations about Frieda are nearer the mark.)

  Four days the D’Angers spent on their slow approach to the siege of Frieda in her stronghold. For four days they strolled streets, climbed hills, ate cream teas, drank shandies, inspected lifeboats. They walked across the dinosaur backbone of the clapper bridge at Tarr Steps, they pulled reassuring banknotes from holes in unfamiliar walls. (Holidays in England did not come cheap.) They thought of visiting the Island of Lundy, but could not discover the times of the boats. High up on the Brendons they ate a sandwich in a pub where they met a dog with three legs and a man with none. They were told tales of smugglers and highwaymen. The night was dark over Exmoor and the stars were brighter than in London.

  They also amused themselves by making a personal survey of the ethnic minorities of the South West, both resident and tourist, comparing the evidence of their own six eyes with the statistics provided by David’s supply of surveys, handbooks and almanacs. I am compelled to say that the D’Angers do this wherever they go. You might think this indicates an unhealthy obsession with racial origins, and you might be right. On the other hand, you might put it down to a natural sociological curiosity. I don’t have to have a view on this, I am simply reporting the facts. The latest edition of The Almanac of British Politics informed the D’Angers that the Black-Asian population of Somerset hovered somewhere between 0.8 and 1.4 per cent, and personal observation introduced them to a turbaned sheik walking alone on the top of the Quantocks, a family group from Wolverhampton eating fish and chips at Combe Martin, a Q8 petrol station manager, a student group of quantity surveyors of Middle Eastern aspect measuring the beach at Porlock Weir, and a scattering of signs for tandoori take-aways, Chinese take-aways, Taj Mahals and Curry Paradises. The vegetarian curries of West Somerset and Devon were, to David’s disappointment, not very good; David needed a curry fix several times a week, which was easy enough to find in London and Middleton, but not so easy in this outpost. David had held high hopes of Watchet, where a consignment of Ugandan Asians had once been billeted, but none of them seemed to have settled. Watchet offered Battered Cod.

  No, this was the white man’s kingdom. Beaker folk and Belgae, Bronze Age and Iron Age, Celts and Romans, all had been white, or white-ish. There had not been much assimilation or infiltration here. David and Benjamin D’Anger were conspicuous in the crowds. But then, thought Gogo proudly, they were conspicuous anywhere.

  On their last afternoon of carefree wandering before their planned assault upon Frieda, they made their way to the Valley of Rocks beyond Lynton. As they left the green car park Benjamin feared that this celebrated stretch of the coast path would prove to be an Old Lady’s Promenade, but as they strode on the crowds thinned, and soon they found themselves alone, with black mountain goats skipping like small horned devils above them and seabirds wheeling below them. The path picked its way along the edge of the precipice, and the waves broke on the sterile purple stones. The famous rocks were perched perilously, erratically, in a strange high ridge, in tormented anthropomorphic configurations, as though a scene of great tumult at the dawn of the world had frozen as it cracked. Benjamin could make out a great beaked witch’s profile, a goblin’s hunched back. These were the bones of the old world. If he half shut his eyes he could make them move, he could make them rise up and drag their buried limbs from the green turf and walk. He could make the ground itself heave and spew forth more boulders. He could open a cavern and entomb these strolling earthfolk for seven times seven years. Darkest night would encompass them. At his will the rocks would tumble, the seas would rise. He narrowed his eyes and the horizon quivered, the grass squeaked.

  And then they emerged in Victorian Lynton, and had a cream tea.

  That evening they sat together in the bar of the hotel where they had become regulars: this was their second night in residence. (The barman complained that English holiday-makers were not what they were–in the old days a family would settle for a week, a fortnight, a month: now two nights counted as a long stay.) They ordered drinks and spoke of Frieda. They congratulated themselves on having provided themselves with good camouflage. They were seasoned sightseers now, with stickers and souvenirs to prove it. If Frieda wished to cross-question them on their journey, they had their answers ready. How would she receive them? When they arrived at her gateposts, should they send Benjamin in first, like a sacrificial lamb?

  They had come a long way for this meeting, and they set off the next day with uncertain expectations. Already in reconnoitre they had passed and repassed the turning that led to Ashcombe, but now they had to accept its challenge. The little narrow high-hedged lane plunged deeply and steeply. Tracks led off it, to Bolt Farm and Desolate Farm and Sugar Loaf Hill, and there were one or two acorn symbols and coloured arrows marking footpaths and bridle-ways. But they passed no walkers and no horses. The lane deteriorated into a track, as Rosemary had said it would, and brought them to a gate called PRIVATE.

  Of’ this too Rosemary had spoken, but she had found the gate closed, and had got out of her car to wrestle with it. Now, for them, it stood open. Was this, they wondered, a good omen? Had Frieda opened it for them? Was Frieda waiting for them now, at four o’clock in the: afternoon, like a good granny, with the kettle on the hob? With caution they descended, bumping downwards over cattle grids and pot-holes. As yet there was no sign of the house. They passed a derelict Gothic gatehouse, and continued down through high Victorian rhododendrons and giant hollies and rowans red with bunched berries of blood. The foliage was reckless, exuberant, profligate. And suddenly there before them, below the next turning, was the house, and beyond the house, the sea.

  Cautiously Gogo lurched the car forward over the last few yards, and brought it to a halt before a square archway which led through the front (or was it the back?) of a high three-storeyed grey stone building into a courtyard. As Rosemary had warned them, Ashcombe was not a building of much charm. Of all the charming cottages and farmhouses and gentlemen’s townhouses of the West, this was surely one of the ugliest. It sat there, defiant and large and out of keeping. Like a mental institution, a penitentiary. Whoever could have built such a thing here, and how, and why? Rosemary said she had thought it had once been a hotel, but had given no reasons for this supposition. It did not look very cosy or welcoming. No Felicity here.

  Gogo switched off"the ignition.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  'Avanti,' said David. ‘Su forza.’ (He sometimes spoke Italian when he was nervous. It was a give-away.)

  ‘She can’t eat us,’ said Gogo, laughing falsely as she opened the car door.

  ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum,’ said Benjamin. He was enjoying himself. He knew by no w that she was in there, somewhere. He sensed her. And so it was that, after all, he found himself leading the party. Boldly, he marched beneath the arch and across the courtyard towards a corresponding arch in the far wall: somewhere there must be a door, somewhere here must be the quarters that Frieda had occupied and civilized?

  ‘Grandma!’ he called. ‘Grandma Frieda! Where are you? Are you hiding? Can you see me? Where are you?’

  It was a fine afternoon (how lucky they had been with the weather!) and a clear north light beat backwards up from the sea, which glittered at them through the double arch. They could hear waves upon the rocks and shingle below, and the gentle soughing of wind in small weathered trees. Benjamin called again, and this time, at his call, an ancient black and white sheepdog emerged from a door in the wall of the second arch.
It advanced upon him, wagging its tail. Benjamin patted it, softly, for it was a frail and bony dog. Then he followed it into the building. Gogo and David, in the courtyard, looked at one another, paused, then heard him call.

  ‘Here she is! Come along, here she is!’

  And they followed the boy and the dog, and there, in the garden room overlooking the lawn and the terrace, where once teas had been taken, was Frieda Haxby. She was waiting for them. She stood, and smiled, with her arm round her grandson.

  She too, a hundred years late, was about to take tea. They saw a table, spread with a white cloth, with a china tea-set, with a fluted silver pot and a silver jug and a silver sugar-bowl. There were scones in a heavily gadrooned silver cake-basket and sandwiches upon a. blue Wedgwood plate. A fruitcake embossed with almonds and cherries stood proudly upon a cut-glass cake-stand. Thick cream was heaped in a cut-glass bowl. It was a tea.

  And Frieda Haxby was wearing her tea-gown. There she stood, shoulder to shoulder with her grandson, in a floor-length gown of radiant midnight blue embroidered with silver. Sequins sparkled on her bodice, and ran in little streamlets down her full soft draped skirt. Silver earrings dangled from the lobes of her ears, and her wispy grey hair was arrested by a diamanté pin.

  ‘David, Grace,’ she said. ‘Grace, David. You have come all this way.’

  She sounded moved. What was the old fox playing at this time? Slow-witted, Gogo moved forward as in a dream to peck her on the cheek; David followed her example, with more simulation of conviction.

  ‘I’m so pleased to see you,’ said Frieda in a gracious, a sociable tone. 'Do come and sit down, I’ll go and put the kettle on. Make yourselves at home. I’ll be back in a moment.’ And out she glided, with the teapot, in a rustle of silk.

  They dared not speak in her absence, for fear of breaking the spell, but they looked around in wonder, and soon they saw that all was not as wonderful as it had seemed. This was a stage set, and you could see into the wings. Only the table and its precious loading spoke of order. The floor was an old, faded, bleached parquet, unpolished for decades, with blocks missing or rising from the plane; the papered walls were stained with damp. The light fittings were askew, and the curtains hung in uneven bunches, tied back by string. The tea-table was spotless, but round the far edges of the vast room stood other tables covered in familiar intellectual Mausoleum clutter–papers, files, cardboard boxes. ‘But’, whispered Gogo'to David, ‘it’s all quite clean. And how much weight she’s lost. That can’t be a trick, can it?’

  ‘No,’ said Frieda, returning with a reassuringly blackened and mundane kettle and the silver pot of tea, ‘I really am a lot thinner. That’s not an optical illusion, I promise you.’ She had overheard them, or read their minds. ‘I really can get into this dress. So I thought I’d wear it for you. Milk, Grace? Do tuck in, Benjie. The sandwiches are Marmite and cucumber, not very exciting, I’m afraid. And the scones are Readymix, but I did make them myself. Milk, David? Or do you still prefer lemon?’

  As they settled in to their tea, she chatted on, politely, civilly. So good of them to come so far. She’d got their letter, but it was a long way to the post-box, and time passed so quickly here. She’d known they’d find her. She’d been looking forward to seeing them. Benjamin in particular. How was Benjamin?

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ said Benjamin, his mouth full of sandwich. He could not take his eyes off this apparition of his grandmother. ‘Can you get right down to the sea from here? And where did you get that dress?’

  ‘I’ll show you round later,’ said Frieda, and proceeded to tell them about the dress. She’d bought it–perhaps Grace would remember?–for the Royal Banquet. And she’d worn it just that once, for the King and Queen, when she went to receive her Swedish medal from the Historical Society for her book on the Iron Coast. The dress had cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and it had hung in her wardrobe for years, and was now quite out of fashion. So she had decided to wear it ‘about the house’. She was pleased with that phrase, and repeated it. ‘I wear it’, she said, ‘about the house.’ She paused, then continued, ‘And I wear my other evening dress, that green striped silk one, as a nightie. This one won’t do as a nightie because the sequins prickle and the shoulder pads get caught round your neck when you’re asleep. But the green striped one is just fine for bed. And this is just right for tea.’ She beamed at them, happily, and with great benevolence.

  Oh hard to say what game we play.

  After tea, she offered to show Benjamin round the house. She did not offer to take David and Gogo. ‘You two can stay and watch the sunset,’ she commanded them, and she set off with her grandson. (The moment Frieda was out of earshot, Gogo leapt up and started to rummage.)

  ‘Watch out for the stairs,’ said Frieda to Benjamin, from time to time. ‘Watch that step. Careful with the doorknob, we don’t want to lock ourselves in.’

  The house was enormous. Corridor after corridor, room after room. Frieda pointed out that she lived in a small part of it, but that she liked to know the rest of it was there. ‘It’s a comfort to me, all this space,’ she said, pausing for breath at the top of an attic staircase. ‘All these empty rooms. I could go into them. If I wanted.’ She coughed, a dry smoker’s cough.

  Benjamin tagged behind her, gazing at claw-footed baths with corroded bath taps, at leaning wardrobes, at tiles loosened by damp, at crops of woody yellow fungus sprouting from cornices, at delicate thin-stemmed lilac fairy caps growing from window-ledges, at black spatters and dustings of mildew. Only a few of the rooms showed signs of recent habitation, and all of those fronted the sea.

  In one of the front rooms, on the top floor, he could see that Frieda worked. Here hung a barometer decorated with marquetry shellwork. It registered that the weather was set fair. A large desk to one side was occupied by a word-processor. The walls were covered with postcards, cuttings and messages, stuck on with drawing-pins and sellotape. A table stood in the window, furnished with an oil lamp, a pair of binoculars and a lantern-globe. ‘Sit down, sit down,and look at the view,’ demanded Frieda, and Benjamin obediently sat and stared across the channel at Wales.

  She sat by him, and idly span the globe.

  ‘When I was your age,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d visit every country in the world. Now I don’t know if I’ll even visit every room in this house.’ She sighed, impressively.

  ‘Do you see boats, Grandma?’ asked Benjamin, still gazing through the binoculars, adjusting the lenses.

  ‘Sometimes. Big ones, freighters or tankers, going up to Cardiff, I suppose. And fishing boats. In the summer there’s a pleasure steamer called The Balmoral. That’s quite a sight. There must have been more of that kind of thing in the old days. And they still smuggle, along here. Or so they say.’

  ‘I can see a boat. A little one, chugging. Is that a smuggler?’

  Frieda took the glasses from him, inspected the vessel.

  ‘Could be. How would you know? More likely mackerel.’

  ‘Is it deep, the Bristol Channel? Have you ever seen the Severn Bore? Does it go this far?’

  ‘Full fathom five thy father lies,’ hummed Frieda, and fished in her sequined reticule for a cigarette. She lit it with a match, and threw the match out of the window.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’ve never seen the Severn Bore, but I did see an air sea-rescue. It took hours and hours.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was a boat out there. I heard what I thought were shots, but they must have been flares. And then the helicopter came. It circled and circled. It didn’t seem to be able to get near. I don’t know what the problem was. It kept circling in, then circling out. Like a dance. Like an insect’s mating. It didn’t seem to be able to make contact. But maybe it did. Then I saw the hull of the boat rise. And the boat went down. And the helicopter flew away.’

  ‘Did it rescue the people on the boat?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was too far away. I didn’t see the ladder come down.’
<
br />   ‘Did anyone drown?’

  ‘Frieda shrugged her huge padded sequined wings. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you see in the papers?’

  ‘I don’t see the papers any more.’

  ‘Didn’t you hear on the radio?’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything about it. I do sometimes listen to the radio, but I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘So you might have watched people drown?’

  ‘They were too far away.’

  ‘Grandma?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We went down into the caves in the Mendips. Have you ever been down in the caves?’

  She shook her head, and he told her about the bottomless void and the Cave of Gloom and the twenty-fifth chamber with no exit. He told her about the one brave man who had dared and dared and failed. She listened, coughing and puffing at her cigarette. She nodded.

  ‘So you want to dive into the bottomless,’ she said. ‘Yes, of course you do. Well, you go on wanting that. And maybe one day you will come up into the pure air, on the other side.’

  ‘Is there pure air, on the other side?’

  ‘Who knows? They do not come back to tell us. There must be something, or why would we wish to plunge?’

  She threw her cigarette on to the floor, and stubbed it out on the floorboards with a high-heeled diamanté slipper. She caught Benjamin’s disapproving glance, and cackled.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t set myself on fire. This place is so wet, you’d need a few gallons of paraffin to get even a little blaze going. Every night I spend an hour or two with the firelighters. It’s hard work, here, keeping warm.’