The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Cate took the obliging taxi all the way back to Sintra and went to wrest her client’s novel from Ms Parker-Sydenham’s keeping. The lady proved to be not the tax-evading expatriate Salazar-supporter that her name had evoked, but an impoverished English-language teacher aged thirty who came from Huddersfield. ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, yet again. ‘Don’t apologize to me,’ said Cate, and swept off to the hotel with her trophy.

  She didn’t have time to tackle it that night, as the Egg rolled home in a right state and needed some handling, but the next morning the sun shone pleasantly enough for her to sit out with it in the gardens below the lemon grove. Two hours into the text, after much skipping, she thought she could see what Cazetti had seen in it. At the very least, there was a fine vehicle here for a leading lady, and plenty of opportunities for feminist deconstruction of the past. Lesbianism and espionage, rape and assassinations, art and abdications–what more could you want? Amazing that the subject hadn’t been snapped up before. Clever old Haxby. Cate Crowe, retrospectively, grew indignant with the reviewers. What had the ignorant little oafs been complaining about? This was a cracking good story, plenty of action, glamorous settings, strong characters. Was there a part for the Egg? Not really, for the Egg was hopeless in any kind of classical role–he was a bald brute of the nineties, he’d never be able to play Gustavus or Magnus. (His attempt at Jane Austen had been risible.) But the absence of Egg in the script was the only defect Cate Crowe could see, and she was full of plans as she made her way in from the lemon grove to see if the man had come round yet.

  On her way in she was arrested by the concierge at the desk, a squat and swart and elderly man of some dignity.

  ‘Miss Crowe,’ he said, ‘I see you are reading a book by our old friend Miss Haxby.’

  Cate was surprised and pleased by this recognition: she gave him the book to inspect. He turned the pages carefully, and paused over Frieda’s portrait on the back flap.

  ‘Yes,’ he continued. ‘Miss Haxby was a regular visitor here. Also members of the Swedish royal family. Also we have received Agatha Christie and Marguerite Yourcenar and Sir Angus Wilson.’

  Cate explained that Miss Haxby was one of her most distinguished and valued clients.

  ‘A very nice lady,’ said the concierge. ‘And how is Miss Haxby? We have not seen her for two-three years now. She used to sit here in the garden to write. Maybe it was this book she was writing.’

  Cate said that as far as she knew Miss Haxby was alive and well and living quietly in the country. Writing, it was rumoured, her memoirs.

  Frieda Haxby’s memoirs seemed a more interesting proposition today than they had seemed yesterday. So did Queen Christina. Cate resolved to pursue.

  Cate Crow’s fax from Portugal reached Rosemary Herz on a bad day. She had arrived late at her office after spending an hour at the Nightingale Hospital undergoing various tests: a routine health check for insurance purposes had recently revealed startlingly high blood pressure which had required further investigation. Today her blood pressure was still up. Were these two freak results, or was there something wrong with her? And if so what could it be? She was not overweight, and she did not smoke, she drank only moderately. Surely Nathan was more of a high blood pressure candidate than she? But his was said to be steady and low.

  Stress she did have, and this news had caused more of it. Her Private Patients Policy already cost her a fair sum, Jonathan’s school fees had just gone up, there was talk of removing tax relief on various parts of her pension. Worse than all of that, her job itself was at risk. She had been sitting pretty for three years and had lulled herself into a sense of security. But there had of late been turmoil in the arts world. Resignations, sackings, venom in the press. Robert Oxenholme, one-time Minister for Sponsorship, had denounced the vacillations and pusillanimity of his own department and taken himself off to Bologna for a year to write a book. It was all very well for some. Her budget had been cut and cut again, and her Board was said to be very unhappy about hostile publicity for the last season’s programme. There had been a particularly controversial installation involving live molluscs and crustaceans which had been deplored by some as cruel and by others as political. She had been called to meet members of the Board to review the situation. Maybe she would be asked to leave. Should she ring up her accountant to ask advice on redundancy pay? Probably not. Every time she rang her accountant it seemed to cost her three hundred quid plus VAT.

  This situation was enough to give anybody high blood pressure, that invisible and intangible complaint. Could she feel it coursing round her body, throbbing in the veins at the back of her neck, knocking like a death drum in her temples? She was far too young to suffer from such an ailment. This the specialist had implied, as he probed her genetic inheritance. Did high blood pressure run in the family? Did her mother and father suffer from it? This question in itself was enough to make her pulse race. How could she tell this expensively neat old boy that she had hardly known her father, and that her mother had gone mad? Was her work stressful, he had inquired. Yes, she had said. Yes.

  Rosemary, reading her morning’s post, drinking a strong black coffee brewed for her by her PA, heard echoing in the back of her memory some words from an otherwise forgettable Leader of the Opposition at some party conference nearly two decades ago. What was it he had said? ‘I warn you not to fall ill, I warn you not to get old’? It had been a fair warning. Was Rosemary right to suspect that even her PA had looked at her this morning with a certain levity? Were people talking about her, laughing at her, waiting for her departure? Treachery was in the air. Would she come back from lunch and find her desk cleared, her paintings stacked with their faces to the wall? Would she find herself dispatched to Hadrian’s Wall, or jobless altogether?

  And here, freshly arrived, was a fax from Cate Crowe, asking about her mother. ‘I really need to get in touch with her urgently,’ said the blotchy curly sleek fax paper. ‘Have you any suggestions? Did your brother-in-law ever manage to make contact with her? I’ll be back in London tomorrow, do get in touch. I need to speak to her soonest. I need a signature.’

  Rosemary stared at this communication with a baffled irritation. Was she her mother’s keeper? More to the point, was she one of her mother’s heirs? It would be very handy if Frieda were to pop off and leave a tidy three-way fortune. Who knows what she might be worth?

  This was an ignoble thought, but Frieda, in Rosemary’s opinion, had done little to induce a warmer regard in her children. Frieda had hated her own mother, and now was hated in turn. Frieda had alienated her children from their father, had brought them up unsuitably. Rosemary had little idea of who her father had been, what he had looked like. Had he been a red-faced, choleric, pressurized man? She thought not. He had been a mathematician and a drinker, a weakling and a runaway. Or this was the picture of him that Rosemary, on slim evidence, had formed.

  The three Palmer children had never talked about their father, had never discussed why he had disappeared while they were still in their infancy. Daniel, the eldest, had set the tone of reticence. He could not bear to hear his father mentioned. The girls had not dared to speak of him. The subject was taboo. And Frieda too had kept her silence.

  It would be trying to inherit high blood pressure from so absent a parent. Frieda herself had never suffered from it, as far as Rosemary knew: but why should she know? Of what had Frieda’s sister Hilda died? Frieda’s own father had died of a stroke. Perhaps it was the Haxby blood that had broken the little vessels in her eyeballs and treacherously weakened the muscles of her heart.

  Rosemary, at her desk, was in mild shock, which intensified into something near panic. She did not want to be ill. She had never been a hypochondriac, had never suspected herself of any ailment. This made the shock the worse. She was untrained in anxiety. Should she ring Gogo and ask her what high blood pressure in a forty-year-old might mean? Or did she prefer not to know the worst? The specialist had told her she must go back to the clinic th
e next week to be fitted with an ambulatory monitor. If news got out that she was not in perfect health, she would be sacked at once.

  Cedric Summerson had been the blood pressure type: you could tell it from his complexion. Frieda had fancied beef-coloured men. Several of the uncles who had featured in their childhood had been red of face, including the most dominant of them, who had lasted a good eight years or more. He, like Cedric, had been stout, solid, fleshly. He had been rich and important and he had brought gifts. Uncle Bernard from Austria. He had been jowled and guttural, heavy and clever. He had been a philosopher and a philanderer. He had many children of his own and several wives, but he had nevertheless seemed anxious to spend his evenings in the Mausoleum in Romley with Frieda. He had helped Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary with their homework from time to time. He liked children, and they had liked him.

  Rosemary had not thought of Bernard for years, and recognized that there was not much purpose in thinking about him now: whoever was responsible for her condition, it could not have been Bernard. He was genetically innocent. Innocent, and dead. He had died three years before, and had been buried with pomp. Frieda and two or three widows had attended the Memorial Service at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Rosemary had seen Frieda’s photo in the papers, on the steps, arm in arm with one of the widows, unsuitably sharing a joke.

  Frieda had been a scandal, in the days when scandal was less common than now. And she continued to be a scandal. Rosemary looked at Cate Crowe’s fax and wondered what to do next. In the olden days one could have sent Frieda a telegram. Rosemary was just old enough to remember the days when telegrams were little yellow serious messages instead of large Occasional Greetings Cards that take just as long to arrive as normal mail, and a good deal longer than a fax. Was there money involved in Cate’s cry? It smelt like it. Could she send a courier down to the West Country to summon Frieda? Could she alert the local police? Or perhaps she needed a lawyer, a detective? Could Frieda be cajoled into a signature? And if she couldn’t, could Daniel take on power of attorney?

  During her lunch break, eating carrot and nut salad with a plastic fork from a disposable plastic box, she investigated. Her PA (a well-trained young woman) had obtained telephone directories of Somerset and Devon, for it had occurred to Rosemary that there was no need to send a motorbike all the way from the metropolis. Even rural England (and it had, as she had driven through it earlier in the year, struck her as ridiculously, almost pretentiously rural) must have dispatch riders. And yes, here they were, two yellow pages of motorcycle and van couriers, promising urgent speedy fully insured distance-no-object twenty-four-hour same-day nationwide conveyance of documents, parcels, packages, even livestock. One could dispatch a hamster or a goldfish, or, as a hospital had recently done, to in her view excessive public opprobrium, a dead baby.

  No problem there, but what should she send to Frieda? A copy of Cate Crowe’s fax, perhaps? That would let her out of having to make up any verbiage. She looked at the fax and decided that it wasn’t quite suitable. There was something insufficiently deferential in Cate’s wording–nothing overtly offensive, just a general lack of the obsequiousness that Frieda seemed to think her due. Rosemary would have to rephrase it slightly, make it sound lucrative, tempting, important.

  Was there any hurry? Should she wait for Cate to get back to England with more details? Should she consult Daniel and Gogo?

  She could feel her blood chugging, blooming, swelling. She tried to breathe deeply, calmly. She recited a bit of a mantra she had once picked up in a yoga class, and stared at the Henry Moore sheep on the opposite wall. The sheep stared back with their silly saintly faces.

  The young man on the motorbike buzzed happily along the high coast road, through the bracken and the gorse, past the nibbling sheep and a small herd of Exmoor ponies, sheltering from the prevailing wind in the lea of a high wall of beech hedge. It was a wild clear day, with high clouds over the channel: a dramatic day. The road was a switchback and he took the bumps and curves at a reckless speed. It was good to be out of Exeter, and moving fast. This was an important mission. He was bearing a valuable document, marked CONFIDENTIAL: DELIVER IN PERSON TO ADDRESSEE. The route had been marked for him in shocking pink Glow Pen by Mr Ffloyd on an OS map. Terry wasn’t all that brilliant at map-reading but he could tell that he was off to a remote spot, off the beaten track. He had been told to track down Miss Frieda Haxby, to force her to acknowledge his package, to compel her to sign for it, and if possible to extract from her some kind of answer. This struck Terry as quite a lark. His engine revved and roared as he overtook a G-reg Renault and a tractor.

  The descent to Ashcombe slowed him down. His machine skittered over stones, bumped over ruts, churned up mud. He was almost at the bottom, almost at the sea’s edge, when he saw the roofs and bell-tower of the big house, just below him. There was no sign of any habitation, no smoke curling, no post-box stuffed with circulars nailed to a tree. It was desolate. Ferns sprouted at him from high banks. Boughs thrashed. It was getting darker, though it was only midday. Rain was on the way from Cornwall. He was dry and warm inside his windproof leathers, he was buckled and badged like a knight errant. A secret skull and crossbones was stamped upon his black shirt, and beneath his black shirt his snake tattoos rippled.

  This was a wrecker’s coast. Two summers ago he’d had a few drinks in The Wreckers’ Arms,just ten miles back on the headland. The pub had been hung with trophies. Planks with inscriptions, brass lamps, old manacles, a pair of painted wooden hands from a wooden ship’s figurehead. Terry and his mates had had a few pints, then smoked a few joints amidst the hot bracken. Bliss. The unmanned lighthouse had winked and turned.

  Terry Zealley parked his bike in the weed-choked courtyard and stared up at the bleak façade. Then he marched boldly towards the nearest door, and knocked. He pressed an old white button of a bell but could hear no answering sound within. He knocked again, then advanced, tried the sidedoor, shouted. He could sense there was nobody here. The old bird had flown. He skirted the side of the house, as Will Paine had done before him, making his way to the front lawn that faced the sea. Again he shouted and his voice sounded thin in the wind.

  One of the long, low, mullioned windows had blown open, and was swinging and creaking. This was odd. Terry Zealley crossed the lumpy grass, and peered in. He could see a large table, laid with various objects, including a bottle and glasses, and several smaller tables, some also littered. It looked, as he was later to tell his mates, like the Marie Céleste. It was creepy. Again he shouted, into the damp interior. He could have climbed in, easily, over the low window-sill, but instead he went back to the sidedoor, and tried it. It was unlocked. He went in.

  The house smelled of dereliction, but there were signs of recent occupation. Muddy boots in the hallway, a raincoat and a stick hanging from a peg, tins of dog food in a cardboard carton, a new-looking Calor Gas bombe, empty milk bottles, a plastic bag of wine bottles and fizzy-water bottles that looked as though they were awaiting a trip to a bottle bank. Terry backed out again, to explore the courtyard, the back regions. There might be somebody hanging about in the outhouses. In one of them stood an old grey Saab, with a broken wing mirror. It was unlocked. He opened the door, sniffed. It was stale, a smoker’s car. A tin of boiled sweets sat on the dashboard, with a spectacle case and a box of tissues. Nothing remarkable there.

  As he slammed the car door shut, hoping and fearing that the noise might attract attention, he heard a low whining, and saw, approaching, an old thin black and white dog. Terry, born and bred in a Devon village, knew that kind of dog: a scrounger, an outcast. He whistled at it, and it approached, its ears flat, eager, but keeping its distance. It would not come near his offered hand, but crouched, looking at him with its head tilted. Terry started back towards the house, but the dog did not want him to go. It looked at him and whined again, a mournful supplication, then stood up and set off towards the garden, stopping to see if Terry were following. Was it trying to take him towards his
mistress’s body, his mistress’s grave? Was she lying in the woods out there with a broken leg?

  Terry followed the dog, which led him down the shrubbery and through a gap in a hedge to a lower level of neglected kitchen garden and crumbling walls. The ground was thick and wet with autumn leafmould, and puffballs and parasols sprouted from the decay. Brambles thick with berry clambered and caught at him. Flies buzzed, for this was a sheltered spot, and somebody had been burning garden rubbish–he could see and smell the remains of a large bonfire. He approached, kicked at the charred sticks. It had been a large fire, for the blackened circle it had left was some five feet across. Grey-black logs, partly consumed, and soft mounds of finer ash. Terry kicked again, and ash rose into the air. Looking more closely, he could see the remains of what looked like thick wads of papers, whole boxes of papers, which had been heaped on to the pyre. Was it a recent fire? Was it his imagination, or could he feel a faint warmth? He kicked again, and fancied that a single spark flew upwards. A fire like that could smoulder for days.