The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Benjamin cupped the globe in his hands. Demerara, Cayenne, Isle aux Morts.

  ‘Come on,’ said Frieda. ‘We’d better get back, they’ll be wondering if we’ve fallen off the battlements. I’ve just one more place to show you before we go. I’ll show you my treasure house. Follow me.’

  And she set off, down some backstairs with old bell-pulls, to a room that she called the butler’s pantry.

  ‘I don’t know if it was the butler’s pantry,’ she said, ‘in fact I don’t know what a butler’s pantry is, do you? But that’s what I call it. I’m in charge here. I call things what I like. Upstairs, downstairs, what I say goes.’

  There were drawers, and cupboards, and a sink with copper taps deeply encrusted with blue-green verdigris.

  ‘Look,’ she said, opening drawers. ‘Here’s the family silver. What’s not on the tea-table. If they ask you where it is, when I’m dead and gone, you can tell them.’

  Wrapped in green baize lay cutlery, candlesticks, sauceboats, ashtrays, monogrammed cigarette cases. A tortoiseshell box with cufflinks. A velvet-lined box with coffee spoons. Pastry forks, fish forks. An ivory-handled ladle. Treasures from a past world.

  ‘These are Palmer pieces,’ she said. ‘There was nothing on the Haxby side. Nothing to speak of. You never met your grandfather.’

  She stated this as a fact, inviting no query.

  She opened another drawer, full of a tangle of old necklaces of shell, coral, amber, green glass. ‘Nothing valuable here,’ she said. ‘Don’t let them waste time sorting this lot out. There’s nothing here. Except’–and she picked out a square maroon plum leather gold-initialled box–‘except this. This is my best medal. It’s probably worth something.’

  It lay in its ivory-cream satin nest. A ribboned, enamelled heraldic brooch, gold and blue and yellow, with writing upon it, in Latin and in another language he did not recognize.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s probably worth a few bob.’

  She fastened the box’s little golden hook-and-eye catches, and put it away at the back of the drawer.

  ‘I suppose you’re too old for farm animals,’ she said, as she opened the last drawer.

  She handed him an old Clark’s shoe box. He lifted the damp lid. It contained small chunky animals, crudely hand-carved from wood–cows, horses, pigs, sheep. They were carefully arranged, more lovingly stored than the silver and the beads. They were forlorn yet cherished. Benjamin could see that a whole childhood was preserved in that box. He narrowed his eyes and stared at them. They were full of power. He could awaken them. He stroked their blunt heads with his finger.

  ‘They were mine,’ said Frieda. ‘My father made them for me when I was ill. I was in bed for weeks. He made me a farmyard, and these were the animals. He was a farm labourer, your great-grandfather. He liked the beasts. That’s what he called them. The beasts. Though mostly it was ploughing. The sugar beet. And humping sacks.’

  She paused. ‘I was in bed for weeks,’ she said.

  ‘What was the matter with you?’

  ‘I fell off a ladder at the mill. We weren’t supposed to be there. We were trespassing. Look’–she pulled up her long skirt, ruching up the fabric to bare her thigh–‘look, there’s my scar.’

  He stared at the purple-white, shiny, puckered scar on her bluish elderly mottled soft flesh.

  ‘That’s when he made me the animals. I was delirious. They thought I’d got tetanus.’ She rolled her skirt down again, to his relief; and laughed. ‘We called it lockjaw, in those days. Terrible things happened to you if you got lockjaw. Fits and spasms. I don’t think I had lockjaw, I’d probably have died if I had. I think I just didn’t want to tell. It’s a fine scar, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ghastly,’ said Benjamin, happy to praise it now it was concealed.

  ‘They couldn’t stitch it, too much dirt in it. I was delirious. I thought I could make the animals move.’

  ‘And couldn’t you?’

  She looked at him sharply. ‘Well, for me they moved,’ she said. ‘But I was only a child.’

  ‘One last thing,’ she said, reaching into the back of the drawer, and taking out a small japanned tea-caddy. ‘Your great-grandfather gave me these too. They were turned up by the plough. He was always hoping to find a golden necklace, or even a coin. Bert Caney found some coins. They’re in the museum at Peterborough. But all my father found were these. Do you know what they are?’

  Benjamin handled the cool and amber-green, the coiled and wrinkled twists of stone. He shook his head.

  ‘They’re fossils. Fossil shells. But the village people called them the devil’s toenails. They were two a penny. They were always turning up. But we liked them, my father and I.’

  ‘I like them too,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘They’re all that’s left, of those days,’ said Frieda. He was shocked, for tears stood in her old eyes, she blinked, and her firm voice caught and trembled. How could she care for things so long ago? Such small things from so long ago? Was she going to cry? He could not bear it if she cried. But no, she shook herself, her sequins glittered, she was back in the saddle.

  ‘You can’t have them yet,’ she said. ‘But when I’m dead and gone, they shall be yours. I’ll add them to my will, if I remember. And to Benjamin, the toenails of the devil.’

  She put them back in the drawer, briskly wiped her dusty fingers on her dress, and gathered herself together. ‘We’d better get back to your parents,’ she said. ‘They’ll be nosing around in my secrets. So you’ve liked your little holiday, have you? You liked Funster Dunster and the Exmoor ponies? Have you seen any deer yet? What the brochures call wild-life is good round here. There’s lots of it. I’m studying it. Shall I tell you something? It may come in handy.

  Crows are green, rooks are blue,

  Crows are three and rooks are two,

  I may live for ever, and so may you.

  Remember that, won’t you?’

  ***

  The soul and body rive not more in parting

  Than greatness going off.

  ’Tis safer playing with a lion’s whelp

  Than with an old one dying.

  On the way back to the hotel, the D’Angers reproached one another. They had been hoodwinked, they had performed none of the tasks they had been dispatched to perform, they hadn’t reached the first item on their agenda. Rosemary and Daniel would be outraged at their negligence, their inefficiency. They’d forgotten all about Cate Crowe and contracts and tax forms, they hadn’t handed over any of the messages they’d been collecting, they hadn’t discovered how many acres went with the house, they hadn’t found out whether Ashcombe was freehold or whether the land belonged to the Exmoor National Park, they hadn’t asked about insurance or electricity or Calor Gas or telephone messages or postal deliveries or drainage. They’d eaten their tea, and that was about it. True, Gogo had discovered evidence that Frieda seemed to be writing her memoirs–a parish history of Dry Bendish, a report from the village school where Frieda had begun her education, a cutting from a school magazine thanking Mrs Ernest Haxby for her war work, a history of the sugar beet industry in Britain–but she hadn’t had time to take it all in, and David had wasted the precious half-hour of Frieda’s absence by browsing through some Grimm fairy stories illustrated by Arthur Rackham. He had been attracted to these by a large message stuck on top of an old-fashioned well-worn gold-leafed volume, on a pink Post-It, from Frieda to herself, asking, DID RACKHAM WORK ON EXMOOR? ASK JANE.

  As missionaries, as detectives, they had been failures. David and Gogo turned to Benjamin for help, wheedling him to rack his brains for details, but he wasn’t very helpful: yes, all the house was damp, with great mushrooms in places, and she said she’d never been into some of its rooms. Upstairs she had a globe and binoculars and a word-processor. She said she’d found a human skull under the floorboards, but she might have been joking. No, he hadn’t tried any of the taps for hot water. Had they?

  The truth was that, confr
onted with Frieda in a ballgown, they had been disabled. She had taken the initiative. How to assess what she was up to? She had looked well, but was it natural to lose so much weight so quickly? It seemed stupid to ask if she was eating properly, when she had provided them with such a feast–but what did she live on when no one was watching? Did anyone ever watch? Did she know anybody in the neighbourhood? Who was Jane? Was Frieda gaga, was she wandering, or was she in more than her right mind? And did that dog have fleas?

  Frieda’s step had been sound, her voice clear. She had not faltered or trembled. (Benjamin kept to himself her moment of frailty over the fossils.) If one had met her in a tea-room, in Sainsbury’s, at dinner, one would not have suspected any form of dementia. There was nothing certifiable about choosing to live alone on the edge of a cliff. And they had liked the view. On the whole, they agreed, as they drove inland over the yellow and purple moor towards the Egremont, they had to take their hats off to her. She looked just fine. They’d have to bluff it out with Rosemary and Daniel. Tell them to mind their own business, tell them they were lucky to have a mother who wasn’t moaning at them night and day, or breathing down their necks, or costing them a weekly fortune in a private nursing home.

  Gogo had recognized the dress of midnight blue. Was it madness, to wear an evening dress at tea-time?

  So Frieda had bought it to wear in Stockholm, with kings and queens and princes. She had been given one of the highest honours of the land, for her work on the iron mines of Sweden, for her careful reconstruction of Mary Wollstonecraft’s epic voyage in search of treasure round the Swedish shore. All of Frieda’s projects had been slightly crazy. That was how she had got where she was.

  ‘After all,’ said Gogo aloud, ‘if you can’t be mad when you’re old, it’s a pity. And I don’t think she is mad. I think she’s just gone in for some new form of free association. And at her age, what does it matter?’

  ‘What’s free association?’ asked Benjamin.

  ‘Letting the mind wander,’ said David.

  ‘Exploring the subconscious,’ said Gogo. ‘Bumping around in the dark.’

  They drove on in silence for a while, until David spoke. ‘Wasn’t there some story,’ he asked, ‘about an older sister who died?’

  ‘In mysterious circumstances,’ agreed Gogo.

  ‘An older sister?’

  ‘That’s right. Aunt Hilda. Or, as I’ve just discovered, Aunt Everhilda. I’ve just seen her birth certificate. Everhilda Haxby. Can Everhilda be a real name?’

  It had an ancient, Anglo-Saxon ring to it, they agreed. Everhilda and Frieda Haxby. Little Nordic Valkyries, little warrior maidens, little Grimm girls.

  ‘Do we know what happened to her?’ asked David.

  ‘Little pitchers have big ears,’ said Gogo.

  ‘Come off it,’ said Benjamin. ‘You can’t use me as an envoy, and then refuse to tell.’

  Gogo laughed.

  ‘I’d tell you if I could, Benjieboy, but the honest truth is I don’t know. I think she may have committed suicide. Frieda never mentioned her but Gran–my gran, your great-grandmother–she hinted at it once. Something funny happened in the woodshed, but I don’t know what.’

  ‘What woodshed?’

  ‘Oh, just a joke.’

  ‘Oh look,' said Benjie, forgetting Everhilda. ‘Stop, Dad, do stop. Look!’

  And David pulled the car in to the side of the road, for there, on the brow of the moor, was a young herd of andered stags, crested against the evening sun, grouped as for a postcard. Cars were pulled up all along the hillside, as tourists got out cameras and field-glasses. The D’Angers got out and joined the scattered impromptu viewing panel: Benjamin accepted the offer of a loan of some binos. (They were better than Frieda’s, he discovered. Hers had been Taiwanese and these were Swiss.) The stags posed, grazed, and raised their noble noses to the evening air.

  Gogo and David stood arm in arm, much married, watching their darling boy as he watched the beasts.

  ‘You can say what you like about Frieda,’ said Gogo, as the stags slowly began to saunter away, ‘you can say what you like. Mad she may be, but she’s been a worker. When you think where she started from. It’s been a long, long journey.’

  ‘Yes,’ said David. ‘And I wonder where she’s heading for now. Did you notice, she didn’t mention hamburgers or sugar or politics once? And she didn’t even ask after Daniel or Rosemary until you brought them up. She must have got some new kind of bee in her bonnet. I hope she doesn’t let it loose on me.’

  Frieda stood by her favourite rock pool in the slanting light. The evening skies of her first autumn promised well. They turned the stones to a sharp, roseate, Pre-Raphaelite pink and purple and blue.

  A string of bubbles rose from a crevice at the bottom of the pool. There was always a string of silver bubbles rising from this pool at low tide. They came from the submerged heart of the rock. She thought of a spring near Granada, at the place where Lorca died. She had forgotten its name. There, near the olive grove where the poet was buried, tears of air rose perpetually through green clear water into a tearshaped well. These drops of air had wept upwards for centuries to prophesy his murder and now they would mourn him for ever.

  So they had gone and left her to her fate. To be fair to them, she hadn’t given them much choice. They’d enjoyed their cream tea. They’d eaten quite a lot. She had caught Gogo reading Everhilda’s birth certificate, and David deep in Arthur Rackham.

  The Grimm stories had belonged to Hilda. Frieda had stolen them from her sister. When she was little Frieda had loved the goblins, the princesses, the old men of the sea, the water maidens, the raven brothers, the haunted woods. Yet the stories were often absurd, often inconsequential. Frieda’s literal, logical battleaxe of a mind had been bemused and entangled by these tales. She had tried to chop her way through the briars. She did not like nonsense. There was a mystery there, forever beyond her grasp.

  She began to pick her way back up towards the house.

  There were so many versions of the story, and all of them were false. You could begin it this way.

  Once upon a time there were two little girls, and their names were Everhilda and Frieda Haxby. They lived in a cottage on Chapel Street in the little village of Dry Bendish, which stood on the only hill in the flat, flat lands of the east. Their father Ernest was a poor mar who tilled the earth and sold his labour cheap and was known as one of the kindest and most foolish men in the village. Their mother Gladys was proud and vain and dreamt grand dreams for her older daughter Everhilda. She loved her pretty older daughter Everhilda, who was fair and delicate, but she was cruel to Frieda, who was plain and dull. She called them Little Swan and Little Mouse.

  Mother Gladys was a clever woman, and she was cunning too. She was much cleverer than her poor, quiet, stupid husband, and when he brought them gifts from the fields–a nail, a pebble, a fossil, a horseshoe–she poured scorn upon them. She read to her daughters the stories of the old gods, and told them that their ancestors had come from far away, across the iron sea, from the land of the Vikings, to this dry inland hummock. She told them they must be warrior maidens, for this world is but a battleground. They must sharpen their brain-knives, or they would be poor and weak like their father. She set daughter against daughter, and daughter against father, for she saw that Frieda prized her father’s gifts. Her own gifts were the gifts of brain and book and word. You are my child, little swan, she would say to Everhilda. Let the little mouse play in its straw.

  But Everhilda was cunning too, like her mother, and she saw that her sister was weak, and so she made her sister her slave. She wove a spell over Frieda. The two sisters shared a little bedroom under the eves, and at night Everhilda would creep into the little one’s bed to subdue her. Poke, pry, lick, scrape. And as she grew older, she told her stories, stories even more frightening than the stories their mother told. She told tales of children lost in woods and eaten by wolves, of maidens forced to marry cruel dark men from the dist
ant Orient, of little girls sunk beneath the bog in the underworld where great spiders dwelt, with dung beetles and centipedes and earwigs and woodlice and mealworms and tapeworms, and froghoppers and scorpions and scarabs and bats and birds of prey. And spiders would stitch open the eyes of the little girls so that they could never close them, but would be forced to stare unblinking and forever at the monstrous world beneath the world.

  (‘Like this,’ Hilda would say, advancing upon Frieda’s bed, and forcing open her sister’s eyes with hard little fingers, ‘like this. And she can never shut them again, and the insects walk all over her, they walk in and out of her nose and her ears and her mouth and her hair and her clothes, and they crawl into her body and they lay eggs down here, in her body.')

  And so the little sisters grew up, and so the little mouse sister whimpered and scuttled with fear. And then a day came when the big sister said to the little sister, ‘Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?’

  Or the story could have begun this way, of course.

  Once upon a tíme there was a little girl with golden hair who lived happily in a cottage with her mother and her father, and her mother and her father loved her dearly and gave her everything her heart desired. But one day there came a baby stranger to the little cottage, and the mother and the father told the little girl she must love and cherish the little stranger. But the little stranger was a fierce and changeling child, and it cast a spell over the little girl, and forced her to be her slave. Night after night, the stranger child would demand more and more stories from the little girl, and would keep her awake in the long night hours, and the little girl was forced, night after night, to invent more stories, for the stranger child said she would die if once she fell asleep. And the little girl grew pale and weak, while the stranger child flourished.