They look at her hat.
‘I got that from the Spastics,’ says Jane Todd proudly. ‘You wouldn’t have guessed that, would you?’
‘And my bag,’ continues Jane Todd, ‘is Cystic Fibrosis.’ They gaze at her bag. It shines and swells.
Oh dear, laments Jane, she would miss Frieda. There weren’t so many like-minded people on Exmoor.
She was so sorry she’d been so long getting in touch. She’d been in Cornwall, visiting a friend who’d just had a hip op. She only heard the news when she got back. Oh dear what a worry.
Jane Todd did not look very worried. Her morbidity quotient seemed surprisingly low. She was much more interested in pink toothwort and monogrammed silver teaspoons and second-hand hand-knitted Fair Isle pullovers than in sudden deaths, drownings, suicides. She was a very unprying person. When asked if she herself had a family, she hardly seemed to know the answer. Yes, she thought she did have a son and a couple of daughters and a few grandchildren, but she couldn’t quite remember where they were these days. Or that was the impression she gave.
Gogo could see that this indifference would have appealed to Frieda.
They agreed, after her departure for Paddington, that her evidence was little help. She could testify to the fact that Frieda, on recent sightings, had seemed cheerful and of sound mind, but that got them nowhere. It could perhaps be used in court to try to establish that Frieda’s last will and testament was not the ravings of a mad old woman of the moor, but they would leave that to Daniel to pursue. Should it come to that. Both had noted that Jane Todd had made no mention of a houseboy called Will Paine, or of any other inhabitants or visitors to Ashcombe. Frieda and Jane had seemed to dwell in a remote, unpeopled, fantastical world, detached from human history by age and much wandering, content with trees and rocks and roots and bell-flowers.
Jane Todd, at the Cochrane Gallery, listened intently to the lecture on the flora of Alberta, and watched keenly as slide followed slide. It all went in one ear and eye and out the other, but for the space of an hour her eyes were pleasantly occupied by saskatoon and choke-cherry, by monkshood and harebell and gentian, by scarlet mallow and snow buttercups and mountain forget-me-not, by Indian paintbrush and asters of purple and gold.
THE CAVE OF GLOOM
Frieda’s body was recovered three weeks later, washed up twenty miles along the coast off Rampion Point. For more than a month she had ebbed and flowed with the steep tides of the Bristol Channel and the grey swell of the wintry Atlantic. To Lundy she had drifted, and back again, to rest at last on a rocky promontory, at the foot of the iron cliff. Mackerel in the salt water and seabirds and ravens and crabs on the shore had feasted upon her. Her prophecy came to pass, for she was identified not by the scar on her thigh but by the bridgework in her skull. Her scar had been sucked and nibbled away by countless plucking mouths. Her bridgework, loose though it was, had not been washed away. It clung to her jaw. Obstinacy and paranoia had perished, with all other qualities, but the bridge had hung on. The coastguard at Ilfracombe, who recovered what was left of Frieda Haxby Palmer, had known her at once. He had been on the look-out for her. He had felt she was coming his way. He had programmed the charts of tide and wind and weather, and had expected her to come to him. He had waited, and she had come.
He had to send a man down the cliff on a rope’s end to collect her. She was bundled into a bodybag, and hoisted up amidst the crying gulls. He rang the police of both counties, wondering which would claim her. Somerset prevailed over Devon, and Somerset rang Derbyshire to inform Daniel Palmer.
There would be an inquest, Daniel told Gogo and Rosemary.
It is not pleasant to think of one’s mother so long in the icy sea. Even Frieda’s undutiful son and daughters felt the force of this, and could not inhibit their imaginings. But for Benjamin, her heir, her chosen one, the news was ghastly. He took to his bed and would not, could not move. His teeth chattered as with a high fever, although he was as cold as any stone. Gogo sat by his bedside and wept.
There was no hope now of concealment. The newspapers picked up the tragedy, and picked up Frieda’s connections. The well-prepared obituaries were long. Her rogue reputation was assessed and reassessed. Reporters rang Patsy and Nathan and David D’Angeir. The story of Will Paine reached the press, and for a while the Identikit drawing resurfaced. Had Frieda Haxby Palmer been murdered? Had she been pushed off a cliff? Had she jumped off a cliff? Journalists made their way to Ashcombe and described it in Gothic prose. It made a good story. The names of Cedric Summerson and one or two others in high or public places were stirred into the brew. Had M15 been involved? Or the CIA?
None of her family welcomed these attentions, and indeed they were not well meant. David D’Anger was accustomed to finding himself the target of the right-wing, but not to finding the chaste and austere name of his wife dragged into the attacks; nor was he at all happy with some of the innuendoes about the private aspects of his working life. Nobody had yet dared to call him a playboy of the media, or to link his name with that of Lola Belize of CNN, but he could see danger ahead. Nathan was not best pleased by mocking references to his occupational practices (lunches, dinners, clubs and nights on the town), and Rosemary knew that, for her, this was ic. The arts were on principle loathed by most of the press, and as a representative of the arts she was savagely derided: she would not be forgiven for the attention she had unwittingly drawn to herself. Daniel, whose case, like the Wash itself, wound on for ever, assured them from Cheshire that the whole business was a storm in a teacup, that Frieda’s death would be forgotten in a week, but privately he prayed that there would be no more incriminating faxes from Will Paine.
So far the three Palmer children had stuck together in the face of this unwanted exposure, but all sensed that this solidarity could not last. Gone were those pleasant weekends of tennis and conversat ion in Hampshire, those West End theatre evenings arranged by Nathan Herz, those inconclusive but pleasant plans for weeks in Italy. There would be no family Christmas this year: Christmas would never come again in its old form.
Frieda had ruined it all. Jessica and Jonathan knew that they would never play the Game again. Disaster had come upon them.
Old Howard Partridge no longer had any excuse for not digging out Frieda’s penultimate will, but when he produced it it solved nothing. It posed yet more problems, as Daniel, who had first sight of it, knew he should have known it would. It had been no less arbitrary and malicious than her last: indeed in many ways it was much worse. She had named as her executors her recently retired but still sprightly literary agent Bertram Goldie, and Lord Ogden, a heavy-weight legal bruiser now enjoying a comfortable autumn life of overeating as Master of Grotius College in Cambridge. (Daniel, seeing Ogden’s name in the document, recalled that Frieda had sat on the Ogden Committee on something or other–Equal Opportunity? Industrial Espionage? The North Sea Bed?)
Goldie and Ogden had been her executors, and the will which they had agreed to execute had left £20,000 to each of her children and to each grandchild a thousand pounds. So far, so good. But she had left the rest of her estate and all her copyrights in trust to her son-in-law David D’Anger, for the purpose of re-establishing the D’Anger family claim to the Valley of the Eagles, and establishing therein the Just Society, to be founded on the principles of social justice, as discussed. There was a lot more about this Society and its trustees, in small print, along with mentions of the Demerara case and the restitution of economic and cultural rights in Guyana. There was even a mention of the Boston Tea Party. Daniel was so enraged by all this codswallop that he could not bring himself to read it carefully, and he could see at a glance why Howard Partridge had not wished to divulge it. How could any reputable lawyer have allowed himself to be a party to such a document? What could old Ogden have been thinking of? What had David D’Anger been up to? If this wasn’t a sign of undue influence on an unsound mind, then it would be hard to know what was. The prospect of young Benjamin D’Anger winn
ing the lot began to seem almost acceptable, in comparison with this deliberate, money-wasting nightmare. Daniel does not believe in concepts. He believes, or so he thinks, in people. And Benjamin is, at least, a person.
There is no way of keeping the contents of this document away from the other family members, although Daniel has been the first to see them. Daniel is not sure how to dress them up. He is in a cruel dilemma which he begins to think the wicked Frieda must have foreseen. Shall he go for the second will, on the grounds of its superior clarity and sanity, or for this earlier garbage, on the grounds that there is more money in it for him and the Herzes, and that a subsequent appeal could successfully challenge the excessive D’Anger share and hand it back for equal redistribution amongst the next-of-kin? Would a successful challenge to the first will reinstate the disqualified second will? These are complex legal points.
David decides to be bold and to speak to Nathan. Nathan is supposed to be a practical man, a man of business (though Daniel has at times had his doubts about this). He rings at seven in the morning from his Holiday Inn in Chester, and reads out to him the offending paragraphs. To his dismay Nathan laughs heartily, though not very happily, and says that although he could do with £20,000 right now, he can’t think that all that Just Society nonsense could stand up in a court of law. Yet he agrees that it would simply waste Frieda’s posthumous income if they were to challenge it. Better to let Goltho & Goltho give it to little Benjie, says Nathan. He’s a nice boy, maybe he’ll help us out in our old age. ‘The Just Society,’ repeats Nathan, with finely dramatized incredulity. ‘She might as well have left it to the Conversion of the Jews!’ And is it possible, he pursues, after a moment’s pause, to leave your money to a cause that doesn’t exist?
Daniel, who has been lying awake for most of the night, tossing in his flat tight sheets, watching the red digital clock flick soundlessly onwards, has his answer. ‘Yes,’ he says with neat precision. ‘Yes, it is. Bernard Shaw left his to a new alphabet, remember. And Old Hutch Hutchinson of Derby left his to found the London School of Economics. Shaw’s will was successfully challenged, but the LSE is there all right. It was cobbled together by the trustees over a breakfast party near Godalming, if I remember rightly.’
‘But come off it,’ says Nathan. ‘The Just Society! What a freak idea! Now if she’d wanted to found a Society for the Promotion of Social Justice, that would have been different. Everybody says they believe in Social Justice. The words mean nothing. But the Just Society? Whoever heard of such a thing?’
Daniel is not sure if this is helpful, but it is smart. The wording is indeed such that it would be hard to sanction any monies being handed over on its terms by David D’Anger to the Labour Party or any other known organization. Can David himself know what is meant by the Just Society? Is it some agreement between David and Frieda? Had they cooked this up together? (Daniel dimly remembers that there had been some bending of the terms in the Hutchinson-LSE case–hadn’t Hutch originally left nothing to his family, and everything to the cause of Socialism? Was it Sidney Webb who had sorted that one out to everyone’s satisfaction? Or was it that unworldly lunatic Shaw again?)
Nathan, on the end of the line by the Thames, is now wide awake, and is beginning to take a keener interest in the philosophical and legal conundrum which Daniel has sprung upon him. He unhelpfully reminds Daniel that the Ethical Society and the National Secular Society and the Philosophical Society and the British Humanists and even the Gay British Humanists are all bona fide organizations, probably even charitable organizations, to which one could legally leave one’s entire fortune, though it is hard to know how ethics or secularism or philosophy or humanism would benefit from such a bequest. And is justice a concept more vague, more immaterial than ethics or humanism? It would be odd if it were, says Nathan. How would one set about founding a Just Society, Nathan begins to speculate–would it be a society for justice, or a society to discuss justice, or a society that practised justice? Had Frieda’s will spelt any of this out? Perhaps the Just Society could spend its time playing variations on the Veil of Ignorance? How had Sidney Webb got the London School of Economics off the ground? How had he got from a breakfast party at Godalming to bricks and mortar in the Aldwych?
‘By lectures,’ says Daniel tersely. He is beginning to regret interesting Nathan in this topic. ‘He set up courses of lectures.’
‘Well, there you are, there’s your answer. Frieda’s money could all be spent on lectures on social justice. Or on social justice research projects. I bet they cost a pretty penny.’
‘I can’t think that was quite what she had in mind,’ says Daniel.
‘Anyway, whatever she had in mind, she seems to have thought better of it,’ says Nathan. ‘She decided to give it all to Benjamin instead.’
Daniel’s breakfast has arrived, on a tray. He pours himself a cup of coffee, his mind beginning to meander from Frieda’s wills to his river case.
‘It sounds to me’, says Nathan, ‘as though we’d better let Benjie scoop the jackpot. With as good a grace as we can muster. I’m going to buy myself a bonanza break of lottery tickets today. Do you play the lottery, Daniel?’
‘Certainly not,’ says Daniel with austerity.
‘Well, keep me briefed,’ says Nathan.
Daniel rings off. Daniel eats his cooling eggs.
Daniel, it should be understood, is a man of probity. He is, if you like, a Just Man. But his is the justice of the law. He is a man of the law. He dislikes muddles. In part of his mind he knows that it is unlikely that David D’Anger had suborned Frieda Haxby in the hope of personal gain. Nevertheless, he will never trust David D’Anger or his sister Gogo again. They are contaminated by his mother’s caprice.
His river case has disclosed a startling amount of contamination and corruption. Pollution, greed and dirty money have been flowing through four counties. Infection has run downstream, killing fish and decency, gathering momentum, until it flowed into the dirty sea. There have been lies, there have been legal evasions and tax evasions. There have been gestures and posturings. One of the alleged polluters has been seen recently on television, dashing down a clear tumbler of water taken from the River Wash as it flows through the backyard of one of his factories. ‘The champagne of Staffordshire!’ he had declared to the camera. Daniel does not like this kind of posturing, which has become so popular in the television age. It has corrupted us all. It had even corrupted the austere Frieda. For what had Timon’s feast been but a gesture without cameras, borrowed from the minister who fed his daughter on hamburgers for the entertainment of the nation?
Daniel drinks his metallic orange juice, and takes himself to the bathroom to shave. As he gazes at himself in the mirror he wonders if he is beginning to resemble his father.
Had Frieda committed suicide, and if so, what was the law relating to the estate of suicides? Daniel does not believe that Will Paine pushed Frieda off a cliff, but he thinks it possible that Frieda may have jumped. Death by misadventure, the inquest had concluded, but what if Frieda had known herself to be fatally ill? Might she not well have jumped? Daniel has now had time to study the letter that Frieda had received from the National Radiological Protection Board at Didcot, and has discovered that the radon level at Ashcombe, calculated at 850 Bq m-3, is way above the national average of 20 Bq m-3 and way above the danger level of 200. Her house had been full of Radon’s daughters. No wonder the NRPB had urged action. The DoE pamphlet had also stressed that ‘cigarette smoking, which is the dominant cause of lung cancer, aggravates the risk of lung cancer from radon exposure’. Frieda had taken up smoking, she had lost weight, she had developed a cough. Had she therefore jumped into the sea? Such a leap would have been in character. She had a habit of taking precipitate action, of meeting trouble before it met her.
Daniel has not disclosed the radon information to anybody. The letter had stated that it was confidential, and would not be disclosed to anyone else without written permission. Nevertheless, the lega
l implications had sprung to Daniel’s mind as soon as he had seen the label on the Jiffy bag, and the last sentence of the letter confirms his suspicions. It had instructed Frieda that tenants, landlords and owner-occupiers of radon-infected dwellings should consult p. 4 of the Guide. This stated that an owner-occupier had no legal obligation to disclose the results to anyone, but that such a person ‘should take advice about contractual matters’.
Daniel decides not to disclose anything to anybody. Or not yet.
Who would wish to buy Ashcombe, with or without its radon?
***
If Gogo D’Anger had shivered at the news of Frieda’s second will, the Goltho & Goltho will which left all to Benjie, David D’Anger is struck with horror and guilt at the news of the first, which had left so much to The Just. For he has been directly responsible for this madness. Innocent of intent, as he himself and he alone knows, but nevertheless responsible. The perils of conversation, the dangers of philosophy, the pitfalls of speculation! Many hours over the years he had spent in discussion with Frieda Haxby, but it had never occurred to him that she took his ideas seriously. He had assumed it was all a game. She had never seemed to condone his interests. Indeed, she had mocked them, had made fun of them. And now she had called his bluff. She had asked him to press the button. At least, to be fair, she had thought of asking him to press the button. And then she had given him up and thought better of it. She had given him up, as he now gives up himself. But with what disastrous consequences! He had so prided himself on his Palmer alliance, he had cherished his friendly relations. But Frieda Haxby had sown perpetual dissension like dragon’s teeth. She had set her family at war.
The Witch of Exmoor Page 23
