The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  In time, unprompted by Will, the conversation drifts from the Somerset police and the Home Secretary to Glastonbury and New Age travellers. Trevor has all the obsequiousness of a bore who wishes to captivate and placate his listener for ever, but Will, who has managed to indicate that he has no dope upon him, is not forthcoming with views on King Arthur and the Criminal Justice Act. He gets himself dropped off at a service station just beyond Taunton. Thence he gets a quick lift to Tiverton, where he spends the night in a room over a pub, and, in the morning, takes stock.

  Tiverton is a dump. Will Paine is surprised. He had thought it would be a pretty, West Country market town, full of smiling county people and expensive shops, but it is hilly and grim. Most of the shops seem to be selling second-rate second-hand clothing in aid of obscure charities. The population looks grey and elderly and idle. Will walks along a pedestrianized High Street, through a car park or two, round a market precinct where nothing is happening at all. There is nothing for him here. Where are all the wealthy folk of the soft rich south? Clearly they do not hang out in Tiverton. Will decides to move on. He will hitch north, up over Exmoor, to Frieda Haxby. He will offer his services to Frieda, as gardener, handyman, cleaner, fortune-teller. He can read the Tarot, though he doesn’t let on to everyone. Frieda might find a space for him, for a while.

  He has a composite image of Frieda, assembled from evenings of eavesdropping, from studying the dustjacket of the ill-starred Queen Christina, from family photographs stuck in a collage on the wall of the downstairs cloakroom at the Old Farm. She is rich and famous and eccentric. She might take a fancy to him, who knows? She might disinherit that pampered little D’Anger boy in his favour. Her castle might be stuffed with rich jewels. She had been wearing jewels in some of the family pics–emeralds, pearls, diamonds. Maybe she will bestow them upon him. With such fantasies he entertains himself, as he works his way across the moor.

  His last hitch is with a load of doomed cattle on its way to an abattoir. The driver, a taciturn and kindly man, is reluctant to deposit Will Paine by the roadside so far from human habitation, but Will, who has studied the maps, knows that this is the right spot to dismount. He has been evasive about his destination, muttering something about joining some friends with a caravan. The driver wishes him good day. The cramped cattle low. Will Paine sets off along the high coast road, looking for his turning.

  And there it is, a sign to Ashcombe. The track plunges down from the road, steeply, past high banks of leathery sprawling rhododendrons. Will shoulders his bag, and starts the long descent. It is late afternoon. The sun sinks to the west.

  Frieda Haxby is playing patience at a large dining-table which she has lugged to the garden end of what had been the dining-room. The room has long, mullioned windows, and now the bleeding sun pours through their lights on to her cards, her glass of whisky, covered with a postcard against the wasps and flies, her guttering cigarette, and her expanse of papers. From time to time she breaks off from her game to make a note, to turn a page.

  Will Paine can see her clearly, through the windows. She is on view. He is concealed in the shrubbery. He has lost his nerve.

  The descent had been much longer than he had expected, and he doubts if he’ll ever have the strength to climb back up again. It’s almost vertical. And he’d been unnerved, on the way down, by nature. There had been squawkings and rustlings in the woods. Distant dogs had barked. He had heard a strange beast’s roaring, far away. He had passed a stone hut with a padlocked door and conical towers from which a dull thrumming noise seemed to emanate. He had gone under a gateway, surmounted by a heraldic lion and two griffins, almost overgrown with ivy. He had been through a gate marked PRIVATE. He had seen the sign of the vipers. He had heard the melancholy rattle of waves on shingle far below, and the secret voices of contending brooks in the undergrowth. He had flanked the empty walled kitchen gardens.

  He had crept down to the large house, quietly. It was much bigger and grander than anything he had imagined. Rosemary Here had been dismissive about it, had made it sound like an old ruin, but it was imposing. It had turrets and battlements and a belfry and a rambling roof system which he had viewed like a bird from the path above. So steep was the drop from the path that he felt he could have jumped on to the roof with one bound. The gardens had once been formal, and the map of their former glory was still plainly visible.

  Will Paine is frightened. This place is too much for him. It is spooky. He wishes he hadn’t come. How on earth is he going to introduce himself to this mad old woman? She won’t be very pleased to see him, now or ever. On the other hand, it will take him a good hour and a half to get back up to the road, and nobody will pick him up at this time of night. He squats back on his haunches in the leafmould, and thinks hard.

  Frieda sighs over her patience. It is her fourth deal this evening, and this time it looks as though it’s going to come out. For some reason this makes her feel she has been cheating, although she doesn’t think she has. Maybe she hadn’t shuffled properly?

  She has made yet another attempt at her memoirs. Maybe it is another false start. She does not, these days, find writing a pleasant process. She has never enjoyed it much, and looks back now at the facility with which she produced her early work with admiration and disbelief. How had she done such things, burdened as she was with children, husband, sister, mother, and a viper’s knot of hatreds? And not only hatreds. There had been other passions, hard now to credit. Ambition must have been one of them, or she would not have been able to lift herself out of the rutted mud. The ambition was her mother’s, inherited, transferred, a deadly legacy. Had anything been her own? Had even her husband been her own, or had he too been a legacy?

  By writing it down, she hoped to make sense of it, but perhaps there would be no sense. She could not hope to forgive, or to recapture. Love turns to hate by the inexorable law of entropy, but never, thinks Frieda Haxby, can hate ever by the most monstrous effort of the memory or the will be turned back into love. As this landscape, these woods, this body, this country will never be young again, so will hatred never dissolve and be remade as love.

  Impossible, to look back and make sense of love, that destructive, inconstant passion, that seems at times so good. But it is not good, whatever the priests and poets say, it is neutral at best, and at worst a killer. Sexual passion dies, that is well known, but so do all other affections. Frieda Haxby tells herself that she does not care for her children, or her grandchildren; she has outgrown them, as years ago she grew out of her love for her mother and her sister. (She cares a little for Benjamin D’Anger, she reminds herself, but only by way of experiment.) They are grown, they may manage without her. They are no longer part of her. She did her best for them, but her best was not very good.

  She came to dread her mother, and to hate her sister. She came to hate her husband, but that, she believes, is a common story.

  She thinks of the laws of living and the laws of dying, of that severed blob of orange flesh from the sea that had clung to hers. So tenacious, so unformed. And here she is, so complex, and so tired. She has lost that simple will to grip. She turns the cards.

  The personal decays from us, leaving us with no memory of it, although we know that it has been. But it was at its strongest nothing more than an evolutionary trick, a spasm of self gripping to a wet rock. We were born without meaning, we struggled without meaning, we met and married and loved and hated without meaning. We are accidents. All our passions are arbitrary, trivial, a game of hazard, like this game of patience which I now play.

  Napoleon on Saint Helena. Turner painted him on his last beach, against a red sunset, in exile, staring at an ill-placed, an improbable and outsized rock limpet. He called his piece The Exile and the War. So stand I, looking back.

  Here comes the knave of clubs, Le Vicomte le Notre, stout and bewigged; Frieda lays him upon the lap of Marie-Leczinska, Queen of Hearts. This is too easy.

  (Out there in the shrubbery lurks the Knave of Wolverh
ampton, working out his approach. This is a complicated building, facing several ways. He does not wish to startle Frieda Haxby by creeping up on her from the rear. But from which direction would she expect a visitor? She cannot receive many. Though her grey Volvo is in better working order than he had expected. It is newly washed and waxed. She is not a prisoner here.)

  Frieda turns a few more cards, then suddenly sweeps them all in, stacks them, shuffles them, and begins to deal again. She pulls towards her a page of text labelled DOC:MEM8 and stares at it as she deals. It reads:

  ‘I first met Andrew Palmer outside the Rising Sun at Bletchley Park in 1945. It was just before the end of the war. I was still at school. He was in uniform. So was I. He had been sent to meet me by my sister Hilda.’

  This statement is true, as far as it goes, but it does not go far. Frieda draws a little sun on the page, in red waterproof de luxe uniball micro, and adds rays. Then she inks in the sun’s orb. She tries to remember Andrew Palmer as she had seen him then, sent to her with Hilda’s dangerous blessing. Handsome, heroic, yellow-haired, in his RAF bomber jacket.

  She’d been too young to be allowed in the pub. He’d led heir back to Hilda’s billet. She’d been thrilled by Andrew. Well, she was only sixteen, and there was a war on. Should she blame herself for what had happened? Or should she blame Hilda for setting it up? Or should she blame Andrew for weakness, for vanity, for taking advantage, for playing sister off against sister? There hardly seemed to be any point in blaming Andrew Palmer. He’d been a bit player, a nobody. The father of her three children. The pieces had all been in place before Hilda had met Andrew. Before the war broke out. Nothing was Andrew’s fault. She could see that now. Is he alive or dead, she wonders, or is he still skulking in the Orient? Last heard of in Singapore.

  Reduce, reduce. Everything dwindles, everything shrinks. A blue ballgown hangs limp on a brass rail in an Oxfam shop. It has had its last outing.

  Those had been the days of clothing coupons. She had married in a white dress cut out of parachute silk. The days of peace and austerity. But why bother to remember all of that? Tinned cream, tasting of white chalk paste.

  Andrew wasn’t even seriously interested in women. That had been one of the ironies. He had destroyed one, and done his best to destroy another, but he hadn’t wanted either of them. He had run off to Ceylon with a German film-maker. Andrew had been a clever boy, a mathematician, a talker, a spark. A weak and pretty face, as she now remembered it. He’d been a trouble-maker. He had loved trouble. Vain, dependent, narcissistic, androgynous. What had he thought he was playing at, with the Haxby sisters? They were not his style. They came from a different, a bloodier, a more matriarchal mythology.

  The three Palmer children had shown little curiosity about their absent father. They had smelt dishonour and wanted none of it. Frieda has warped them all by her silence. It is too late now to advertise for Andrew Palmer, to set the detectives on to him. She sometimes wonders if he has followed her career. Hard to remember that she had once suffered over his infidelity and his disappearance. Although he loved trouble, Hilda Haxby’s death had been too much for him, and he had run away with Otto Weinberg, who made movies about oil-wells. A coward and a traitor. Maybe he was long dead.

  It hardly seems worth recalling his successors in her affections. Yet at the time they had been important to her. After Andrew, she had favoured more fleshly men, men of substance. Some of them had died corpulent deaths. Some lived and flourished–the Swede still sent her postcards from his many conferences, and recently an ageing Irish lover had written to her, out of the blue, after two decades of silence, asking if she remembered the night they’d spent together in Heidelberg so many many years ago. Did she remember that they had ordered Steak Tartare, not knowing, in their innocence and ignorance, what it would prove to be? And had she been sick in the night because of the rawness of the steak, or because of him? Could she please let him know? It was important to him.

  And, her memory thus prompted, she had recalled in detail this long forgotten night. They had arrived late at the inn. Neither then spoke German, and tourism had not then invaded the Rhineland. The menu had been uncompromisingly German, and they had ordered steak, expecting at worst a chunk of charred tough meat with large white boiled potatoes. But there on their plates had reposed a small dome of red raw flesh, surrounded by a necromantic circle of strange little chemical pyramids of peppers and spices–green, red, black, yellow, crystal white. A golden raw egg yolk in a halved eggshell had topped each frightening bloody pap. They had stared in mutual alarm, yet they were hungry, and had eaten bravely and stubbornly, ignoring the condiments, consuming the meat. After the meal they had taken themselves to their room, where they had found their bedding as foreign, as unaccommodating. A high wooden bed, a rigid bolster for pillow, a feather duvet of vast sighing dusty mountain ranges for their covering. It had taken courage to plunge into that structure, but they had forced themselves, for their desires had been overwhelming. And then, when what had to be done had been done, Frieda had got up and taken herself to the bathroom and vomited up the lot. The meat, the beer, the man.

  How could she have forgotten this disgraceful episode, and why had he remembered it? She wrote back, warily, telling him that as far as she could recall it had been the unfamiliarity of the repast–had there not been sauerkraut on the side?–that had produced her nausea, not his sexual activities. But she would not go into more detail until he told her why he wished to know. And he had written back, from Bellagio, saying that he wished to set the record straight. ‘I am writing my memoirs, here in Bellagio,’ he had informed her. ‘And I wished to know the worst. So write to me again, Frieda sweetheart, and tell me all you know.’

  She had replied tersely, on a postcard: Til leave you out of my memoirs if you leave me out of yours. That’s a fair offer. F.H.P.’

  And indeed she had so far left him out, and all the others: at this snail’s pace she would never reach him, even though he had figured so early in her amorous career. (Her German, now, is quite passable.)

  Is she the same person as that woman who had sweated and moaned with multiple orgasms in that vast antique Germanic feather bed? Is it this body that had eaten that meat? She sometimes wonders. The problem of continuity perplexes her. Has she split off for ever from that rapacious, relentless girl who had devoured and spewed out Andrew Palmer, after screwing three children out of him? A memoir should establish continuity, but sometimes she wonders if the links exist. Can she be held responsible for crimes committed so long ago? Can Hilda? Can Andrew? Were they the same people then as they are now? Hilda is long dead, so her mortal being has stayed the same, fixed at the age of thirty-two in her final act of cruelty, of selfishness, of Pyrrhic victory, of who knows what fleeting angry despair. But Andrew–is he, if he lives, the man who fathered the children, the youth who flew an aeroplane and got back alive, the boy whose grandfather had served in India? Would they recognize one another if they were to meet now? Is any of their flesh the same as that flesh that touched, and rubbed, and fused?

  And what about teeth? Surely these teeth are the same teeth? She runs her tongue against her bridge, lifts it, joggles it. She still has most of her own left. She detests her bridgework.

  Her mother, Gladys Haxby née Bugg, had been keen on continuity. She had invoked Vikings and Norse gods and longships. She had claimed for her children a Nordic inheritance which, who knows, may well have been fact, not fiction. The Haxbys and the Buggs must have come from somewhere. Frieda and Hilda had imbibed a good deal of dubious folk history from their mother, a package of disinformation from which Frieda had been rescued by an exceptional history teacher at Scalethwaite Grammar School, a teacher whom Frieda, if she were more generous, could credit with much of her later success. It was Miss Mee, not Gladys Bugg Haxby, who had set Frieda on a true course. Nevertheless, Frieda owes some of her intimations to her mother. She has had moments of ancestral recognition, when facing a certain combination of blue sky and
low golden grassland and blue water, when laying her hand on an old stone, when gazing at a brown furze upland, or an iron crag, or a fjord. She had not been lying when she had told the disc jockey about her mystic moment by the runic stone.

  In recent years, Frieda has taken the trouble to check some of the fanciful notions which her mother had imparted. And she had discovered that there had been Haxbys in Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire for a few centuries, though none of them had been in any way remarkable. Ernie Haxby had been a farm labourer, not a Viking. The Buggs had been Lincolnshire folk, and Frieda had been pleased to note that the word ‘Bugg’–Danish, Old Norse?–was said to mean crooked, swollen, bulging, officious and proud. Pleased also was she to discover that one of her mother’s favourite grammatical constructions, involving the strongly stressed terminal preposition, was derived from the Scandinavian: every time Gladys declared, ‘If you don’t stop crying I’ll give you something to cry for,’ she was recalling the linguistic roots of her race.

  Oh, yes, there had been an inheritance. A handful of phrases, an old colouring book of the Norse gods with sub-Burne-Jones illustrations, very badly inked in by Hilda. A pre-war rag book of nursery rhymes. A rare Bank Holiday outing to Bayard’s Leap, near Sleaford, with her father, to see the marks of the leap of the famous horse. (Ernie had brought her home from the fields a lucky horseshoe once. She had it still.) And Frieda had been drawn to the north–to its words, its music. (Wagner, so late in the day, had been a revelation.) Why else had she been so dangerously attracted to the Iron Coast, and to Queen Christina? She can blame Gladys and her blood for this.