The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Sort of birds,’ says Emily. ‘A sort of mythological bird. With claws.’

  ‘Sort of eagles?’

  ‘Yes, sort of eagles,’ agrees Emily, for the sake of agreement. She has never heard of the harpy-eagles of Guyana.

  Then Emily goes downstairs to report on Benjie to Benjie’s other grandmother, Mrs D’Anger from Georgetown and Edgbaston. Emily has no recollection of having met Mrs D’Anger Senior before, though she thinks she may have done when very small: she had been illogically expecting some sort of ample Black Mama figure and is surprised to find Clarissa D’Anger to be considerably less grandmotherly in manner and appearance than Frieda Haxby. Clarissa D’Anger is smartly dressed, sophisticated of manner, and, despite her five children, trim of figure: she has not a grey hair in her head, and her red high-heeled shoes are dauntingly, dangerously chic. She now offers Emily a cup of tea, and listens with her head cocked alerdy on one side to Emily’s bulletin. ‘Poor child,’ she says, and reveals that in her view Benjamin’s problems spring from having been sent to a neighbouring comprehensive: he would have been much better off, in Clarissa’s view, at Westminster, or, if David would insist on state education, at the William Ellis. ‘The state system just doesn’t work,’ says Clarissa, ‘I’m sure it would if David ran it. But he doesn’t. Why sacrifice your own child? Such a clever boy. They just don’t give his mind enough to bite on. All this project work, it just gets them in a muddle. The quality of teaching is terrible. Where were you, dear? You and Simon both went to Winchester, didn’t you?’

  Emily mutters that Winchester doesn’t seem to have done them all that much good, and makes her excuses. She backs away from this ambitious, tailored, dark-suited, well-spoken interrogator. She feels suddenly hungover and shabby. She has failed the test.

  Clarissa D’Anger blames the educational system for Benjamin’s breakdown. David and Gogo blame themselves and Frieda. David’s friend the poet finds another interpretation.

  David’s friend the poet is a Guyanese writer called Saul Sinnamary, and he and David have known one another for most of their lives. Both have risen through the systems of both their countries, and Saul leads now a life of global restlessness. He has a reasonably salaried and tenured appointment at a distinguished North American college where he teaches for a few weeks of the year: the rest of his time he divides, as his CV diplomatically puts it, between England and Guyana. He is a little older than David, and less ambitious, or so he claims. He and David meet from time to time, when Saul is passing through Britain, and they meet now, in a pub off the Aldwych. (Saul has been recording for the BBC World Service in that imperial monument, Bush House.) David is anxious to ask Saul about the Valley of the Eagles, for unlike himself, Saul has visited the Interior. He has kept his links. You can tell that from his poetry. It is all in there. Gold and waterfalls, myths and fish, bauxite and basalt.

  Saul does not know the Valley of the Eagles, but he has been to the Kanuku Mountains and the Makarapan Mountains, he has seen Lake Amuku, and he has seen–or he thinks he has seen–a harpy-eagle. A bloody great big bird, huge talons, monkey-snatcher, baby-snatcher. A threatened species. A protected species. Thrasyactus harpyia: Harpyia destructor. ‘Protect the poet, protect the eagle,’ says Saul Sinnamary. ‘They won’t last long.’

  Saul Sinnamary is of the opinion that Benjamin D’Anger is suffering from exile. Although he was born in Britain, he is suffering from exile. He needs the ancestral images. So, in Saul’s view, does David.

  ‘We can’t live here,’ says Saul, over his pint of Murphy’s. ‘We need to get back for a fix. When were you last there, man?’

  David shakes his head.

  ‘Your boy,’ says Saul, ‘he needs to see where he came from. To get in touch. Western medicine is no use to the Guyanese mind. What use are Freud and Vienna to us?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ says David. ‘We came from India, not Guyana. And your lot came from Africa, or so you say. How far back do you want to go? To homo australopithecus? The Olduvai Gorge?’

  Saul Sinnamary insists that he knows what he is talking about. He is a romantic poet and he knows about the effect of landscape on the soul. Jung is a better guide to the psyche than Freud, even though he was a Swissman. Mountains are more use than sex, says Saul. Well, at least as much use. Saul should know, he’s seen plenty of both in his time. You take that boy of yours back home for a break, he’ll be a changed man, says Saul. And take that white nerve doctor wife of yours with you. She’ll love it there. You can take her the easy way if you like, but take her. Take her to the gazebo on Kaow Island, Fred’s brother’s wife’s family are in the catering there. I know, I’ve been there. It’s paradise. A bird should fly home, man. We are homing birds.

  David listens to Saul with respect, for this is a man with a human face, a man who loves his own children however far away they may be. Maybe what Saul says has truth in it? Should he go back to Guyana? Take Gogo and Benjamin on a holiday, on a luxury tour, to see the harpy-eagles and the rufous crab hawks and the blood-coloured woodpeckers and the saffron-crested tyrant manakins and the greatbilled seed finch and the cayenne jay? Saul is something of a bird man, and he has in his wallet a crumpled, dog-eared checklist of the birds of Guyana which he has ticked off–362 species in two weeks, biodiversity run mad, says Saul. Who sponsored his trip, inquires David. ‘I gave poetry readings, man, all the way up the Essequibo,’ says Saul. ‘I lectured them on Caribbean poetry, on Derek Walcott, on flora and fauna, on myth and legend. I caught the pocu and the basha and I helped to cook the rice. They’d never have made it without me. I lectured them on the novels of Wilson Harris. Every trip needs a poet. You’ve got to get off to the interior, to save yourself. You’ve got to get out of the cement and the city and go up river.’

  ‘You lectured them on Wilson Harris? Who were these bird fanciers?’

  ‘They were a captive audience, my friend. It was me and Wilson Harris or the piranhas and the electric eels. They survived.’ Saul laughs. ‘Did you hear that story about Wilson Harris at the 1970 Guyana Republic Celebrations? How he lectured on the continuity of man and nature, on how we’re all rivers of fluid locked up in our skin casements, how we need to flow to the sea? I hear it was some lecture. It baffled them all. It inspired one of the greatest sentences Andrew Salkey ever wrote. You look that up one day. That’s what you politicians need from time to time. A voyage into the interior.’

  David assures Saul Sinnamary that he will look it up. Saul’s speech has set his mind careering. Saul promises to call in one day, to bring Benjamin his book on South American birds.

  Saul has been much taken by the story of Frieda’s double-dealing double will. On the one hand, he points out, it’s one hell of an old-fashioned plot. Wills, legacies, inheritance tax, capital gains tax. A real old nineteenth-century property plot. (‘This is a real old-fashioned nineteenth-century country,’ murmurs David.) On the other hand, it’s an archetypal exile’s dream plot, a twentieth-century transmigration plot. The family jewels buried in the garden of the homeland, awaiting the return of the exiled prince. Return to St Petersburg, to the Polish estate, to Harbin, to Riga, to Kashmir. Reclaim the jewels, the coalmines, the sugar plantations, the aristocratic tides, the deeds. The herd of cattle, the cinammon tree. Forget that, advises Saul. Forget the property. Birds, rivers, they are the truth of the soul. They are free. They are our great allies.

  ‘So you don’t think I should try to reclaim the Valley?’ says David.

  Saul shakes his head. What is possession? What are politics? if you gave me the whole of Guyana, I wouldn’t take it,’ says Saul. ‘I want to be free to come and to go. Dreams of justice end in the abuse of power.’

  ‘Who said that?’ asks David.

  ‘I did,’ says Saul. ‘I, Saul Sinnamary.’ They both laugh.

  ‘Remember Jonestown, man,’ says Saul. ‘The Reverend Jim Jones, he called himself a socialist. He tried to set up the Just Society.’

  David had thought of this, as
we have seen, and has wondered whether Frieda Haxby had been aware of this appalling precedent, this disastrous experiment in social engineering and utopian hubris. On 20 November 1978, the Reverend Jim Jones from Indiana had ordered the 900 members of his People’s Temple to commit suicide, and obediently they had swallowed lethal draughts from a cauldron of sugar-sweet Kool-Aid and cyanide. There, in the Guyanese savannah, on the rich wet land surrounded by rain forest, they had perished. The just, the egalitarian, the communist society, founded in defiance of US capitalism and the nuclear arsenal on 27,000 acres in the North West District. Jones had believed himself to be Lenin reborn, and his American followers (80 per cent poor black and one lone seventeen-year-old Guyanese) had believed in him, to the gates of death. They had died, suffering from athlete’s foot and other skin diseases. They had rotted in the hot rain. The ideal city, with its corrugated huts, its sophisticated electronic radio and closed circuit TV, its foot-rot, its home-grown vegetables. Even now it has its apologists.

  And what of Michael de Freitas, alias Michael X, alias Michael Abdul Malik, a conman on a smaller scale, a power-crazed crackpot who had briefly been the Black Power darling of the Western World? His commune was in Trinidad, and he had been its Prime Minister. He had grown coconut, limes and mangoes, produced milk and manure and propaganda, but then he had taken to drinking blood and murdering his recruits. He had ordered the death of a white woman, and she had been buried half alive in a pit of dung. He had fled from the crime to Guyana, where he had at first been received in style, but as events caught up with him he had gone on the run, had gone into hiding with some ten-dollar notes, some tins of sardines and some biscuits. He had hidden in hotel rooms, in Georgetown, in Linden, then made off into the interior, towards the south-west, barefoot, demented, through the anthills. He had ended up at a thatched shelter called Bishop’s Camp, and there, as he babbled of planting green fields, the police had found him. They had flown him back to Trinidad, where, three years later, in 1975, he was hanged. That was the end of commune leader Michael X. These were not good precedents. Michael X had no apologists now.

  David D’Anger shivers as though someone had walked on his grave, and takes another gulp of his black Irish beer. Saul is staring round the crowded pub, at the mixed races and faces of London town, with a half-smile on his handsome face. David watches him. Bleed, bleed, poor country. Benjamin D’Anger lies fretting and staring at the ceiling, and Frieda Haxby reposes in a small urn in Patsy Palmer’s kitchen, on the shelf above the Aga, among the split peas, lentil and haricots. Will Paine counts his dollars and his pound notes in a darkened room in Kingston. Simon Palmer hallucinates, and walks the hard shoulder.

  Saul Sinnamary declines another beer. He must be on his way. Saul is off to Singapore next day, for a conference on post-colonial literature. He’ll be back in a week, he’ll remember to bring Benjie the bird book, he promises. Promises, promises.

  They walk out into the London night. A beggar crouched in a doorway in a filthy flock-seeping sleeping-bag mutters a ritual request for change, but they ignore her. They walk along the Strand together, to Charing Cross tube station. The climate of Singapore is not dissimilar to the climate of Georgetown, Guyana. It is tropical, hot and wet. It too stands on land reclaimed from the sea. In fact, if you stuck a needle through the earth in Singapore, it would come out in Guyana, more or less. Singapore aspires to the skies, a twentieth-century miracle, a model for all Asian city-states. It is rich and clean and wired up. It has self-flushing lavatories and an air-conditioned subway and many television stations and an authoritarian regime. Both David D’Anger and Saul Sinnamary are thinking this at the same time, as they walk along past the gauntlet of the white beggars, but they do not say so.

  At the entrance to the tube, they part. They embrace. ‘Don’t you worry about your boy,’ says Saul. ‘I’ll come and see you when I get back.’

  David is cheered by this encounter. Saul’s speech about the birds and Wilson Harris offers hope. He changes trains at King’s Cross, and on the Victoria Line he decides that he will suggest a Guyanese Christmas to Gogo. If it’s not too late to book. It will take Benjamin out of himself, give him something to look forward to.

  But when he gets home he finds he may be too late. Benjamin has been rushed to hospital. He has been found unconscious, face down, in the bath. He has tried to drown himself. Or so it seems.

  On Benjie’s bedroom floor lies a torn cardboard box labelled CHUM, a heap of wooden soldiers, some white plaster models crushed into smithereens, some plastic animals, a broken mirror and a hammer. Children’s toys, the end of childhood, a massacre.

  David absorbs all this from the hired hand, summons a cab, arrives at the hospital, fights his way through to the bedside on the twelfth floor. Intensive care. Benjamin is wired up, monitored. But he is breathing, and his eyes respond to light.

  David and Gogo sit side by side in the waiting-room through the darkest night. They hold hands, they wait. There are no reproaches. There is a solidarity in their suffering.

  Benjamin recovers. He can have been out for only a matter of seconds, of a minute. It was Gogo who had found him, visiting the bathroom to replace the soaps. The bathroom door had not been locked. Indeed, it had been ajar. She tells David this, for it is a message of hope.

  Has there been brain damage? They are told there has not. They believe what they are told. Gogo is a professional, she has watched the monitor. They would not lie to her, it cannot lie to her. Benjamin shows none of the seven symptoms of brain damage, brain death.

  Benjamin is apologetic. He had not meant to cause such trouble. He tries to explain, though they try to spare him his explanation. He looks so old and so small and so sad. He says he has been practising holding his breath. He wants to be a diver, to explore caverns. It had only been a game. A silly game. He had been practising for weeks, trying to break his own record. He had counted up to four hundred. He must have slipped. He is so sorry.

  He can come home soon.

  Gogo, in the hospital’s coffee-shop, cannot stop crying. She never cries, but now she cannot stop. Tears flow from her eyes and her nose and she hardly bothers to wipe them away. David holds her hand.

  Where has their Benjamin gone to? Who is this person who tells them that he has tried to drown himself as a game?

  Will Paine is homesick. He wants to go back to Hackney, to the Old Farm in Hampshire, to the Pasta Twirl factory in Middleton, even to primary school in Bilston. He’d rather be in Winchester Gaol than here in Jamaica. He thinks of Ashcombe and the bracken and the roaring stags and the blackbirds and the gulls. Frieda Haxby has cut off his retreat. Her Midas money has sent him into exile. Nobody wishes his return–except, perhaps, for the police, who may still have some questions for him to answer. He has read of Frieda’s death in the English papers. So she had slipped from the coast path. She was not the first to have done so, as the papers also say. But who will believe that she was not pushed? And why should she have slipped? He should never have left her that small supply of grass. He should never have left her to stew up her magic mushrooms. But she had taken to the grass. She said it was good for her liver.

  There is plenty of weed in Jamaica. You can smell it on the hot air day and night. But Will does not feel at home on this dangerous island. He wants a respectable life. Here he drifts and wanders. He is afraid. He cannot make judgements here. At least in England he had known how to avoid being at the bottom of the heap. Here he does not know what the heap is made of, or where its bottom may he. He remembers prison scare stories about yardies, about the Jamaicans on Death Row. There is still a death penalty, here in Jamaica. The Queen of England, shame on her, must sign the death warrants. At least he is more free than the Queen.

  He dares not surface yet. He sews some of Frieda’s cash into his jacket lining. He is surprised that nobody has caught up with him, for he had travelled on his own papers. Perhaps he has not yet been identified. Perhaps Patsy Palmer and Daniel have kept what they know to th
emselves.

  He wonders how Simon Palmer fares. He himself is not in an enviable position, but he would not change places with Simon Palmer.

  Will Paine is lonely. He would like a friend, but he does not know who he can trust.

  It is easier to get out of England than to get back in again. This he knows.

  ‘I wonder,’ wrote the young Charles Dickens, when contemplating emigration as a proper response to an incoming Tory government, ‘I wonder, if I went to a new colony with my head, hands, legs and health, I should force myself to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream! ... Upon my word I believe I should.’

  Gogo D’Anger has never had much time for therapists and analysts, for witch doctors, shrinks and counsellors, though she has friends who wear these labels. She calls herself a physician, and has tended to regard those meddling with the mind and the psyche as amateurs. Even psychology and psychiatry she treats with suspicion. But now, like many before her, she is humbled, and forced to seek for help. Benjamin, it is clear, is suffering from some form of depression. Is it endogenous or reactive, and does it matter which it is? Is it wise to put a boy of his age on psychoactive drugs, and is there any alternative? And if dru gs, which drugs? Benjamin has never been manic, as far as his parents know, but maybe even they have not observed him very closely? David and Gogo ask around, and discover to their surprise that half their friends, for no very obvious reasons, are on Prozac. They are of the Prozac generation without knowing it. But nobody has any clear advice about the medication of the very young.

  Neither of them likes the idea of their boy swallowing substances. Substances may poison him for life. There must be some other way to reach him. Since the incident in the bath, they have watched him day and night. He has promised, wearily, that he will not try holding his breath under water any more, but can they trust him?