A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  Alix could tell that Paul was pleased with the book, and this gave her pleasure. Though why she should try so hard to please a convicted multi-murderer is a riddle, a mystery.

  Ancient crimes. Clive and Susie Enderby contemplated them over a glass of sherry. Separately, together, a whole assortment of them. They were both in a state of mild shock, though neither would have admitted it. The new year had begun badly. This evening, Susie had put on her new mustard-coloured layered coordinates, to cheer herself up, but they hadn’t made her feel all that cheerful. She kept glancing at herself in the carefully angled mirror over the fake marble mantelshelf, to keep up morale. And this was supposed to be a good year, a prosperous year, with Enderby & Enderby in its glittering new premises in Dean Street and Clive in the running to become the youngest ever President of the Chamber of Commerce. A pity it had started off on such an odd note. They should never have gone to Janice’s. It was Janice’s fault. But the mustard was a good shade. And a good dry silky rustly texture too. She stroked her own sleeve. Amber. Amber would look good on the mustard. The false gas fire glowed.

  Domestic tranquillity. The children were playing upstairs, already in their nightclothes, model children. The table was laid in the dining-room, with cloth and candles, for a rare quiet meal together. Susie had looked forward to this evening, had hoped that it might be a small occasion for celebration, for self-congratulation, for closeness. Not that she had consciously thought that she and Clive were growing apart, no, but he was so busy these days, so preoccupied—as indeed he was now, but at least it was by something that she knew about, something that she understood. Susie did not understand Regional Development Grants and European Investment Strategies and Incentive Zones, but she understood all too well what had happened the night before, at Janice’s, and could feel herself, despite herself, drawn towards dragging it up again. Clive couldn’t just go on sitting there, saying nothing, sipping his sherry. And why was he having a sherry anyway? He usually had a gin and tonic. Was it meant to be some kind of comment or something?

  The silence was irritable, painful. It was all Janice’s fault.

  ‘What an evening,’ said Susie, at last, irresistibly. ‘I’m never going to try to make you go to Janice’s again.’

  ‘No need to assume responsibility,’ said Clive. ‘She’s my sister-in-law, not yours.’

  ‘But I was at school with her,’ said Susie.

  That’s hardly your fault,’ said dynamic thirty-eight-year-old Clive Enderby, with a shade of his usual briskness.

  ‘Though as a matter of fact,’ said Susie, ominously changing position in the corner of the settee, ‘though as a matter of fact, I don’t quite see why we were all so upset. By what Janice said. After all, it was probably true.’

  Clive gazed at his bouncy chestnut-haired wife in alarm. She couldn’t want to talk about it, could she? He couldn’t face it. No, he couldn’t face it. There are some things one just can’t talk about. Janice had cheated. She had broken the rules. Was every wife in Hansborough, Breasborough and Northam, was every wife in Yorkshire, about to start cheating too?

  Susie smiled, edgily.

  ‘Actually, I blame Edward,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t see why we have to blame anyone,’ said Clive. ‘It’s not Edward’s fault that he’s married to a neurotic bitch on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘How do you know it isn’t?’ asked Susie.

  Feminism had reached South Yorkshire with a vengeance, in the 1980s. Or at least that is one interpretation of the scene at Edward Enderby’s on New Year’s Day, and of Susie’s reaction to that scene.

  I suppose, thought Clive, we may live to find it funny. But it hadn’t been funny at the time. And Susie was right, the whole thing was probably Edward’s fault. Edward had always been a bully, with a sadistic sense of humour: where he got it from, his younger brother Clive couldn’t imagine. Early ill health, perhaps. Quick-tempered Edward, always ready to put people down. Thin, even gaunt, now, in his early forties. Pushing and pushing. Teasing beyond the limit. Ambition disappointed. He’d always taken it out on Clive, but Clive, so brightly prosperous, had learned to fight back amiably, without hurting, without being hurt. Why quarrel with one’s one-and-only brother? That had been Clive’s attitude.

  But last night had been over the top. Right over the top. Drink, was it? Edward never seemed to drink much, to be drunk, but you could never tell. He’d started at the beginning of dinner, teasing Susie about her new hair colour, teasing Clive about his posh new premises, asking uncomfortable questions of Derek and Alice Newton about their son who’d dropped out of the sixth form at King Henry’s, embarking on a whole run of risky jokes about AIDS. Janice had looked uncomfortable through a lot of this, though whether that was because she didn’t like the chat, or because her mind was elsewhere, you couldn’t really tell. She was a very nervous hostess, was Janice, a bit of a perfectionist who managed to make everyone feel slightly uncomfortable as she dished up not-quite-perfect meals. She kept apologizing because the beef was a little overdone. They all assured her they liked it overdone. And anyway, in Clive’s view it wasn’t overdone at all, it was practically raw, so what was the woman talking about? Not that he minded, he liked it red, himself, he really didn’t like it overdone. He caught Susie’s eye and smiled, as he tucked in. He hated cringing and apologies. He liked people to be sure of themselves. Like Susie.

  It was over the second helpings of beef (second helpings they all felt obliged to accept) that Edward really got going. Reminiscing about meals of the past, cooked by their mother. Not a very good topic, in Clive’s view, as the Newtons were new to the district and had never met the colourful quaint old Mrs Enderby, but less dangerous, it proved, than reminiscences about Janice’s early days of cooking. ‘And you’d never believe this, from this excellent meal we’ve just eaten tonight,’ said Edward Enderby, smiling a little manically, gesticulating with the carving knife, ‘but Janice, when I first met her, was an atrocious cook. Atrocious. Couldn’t boil an egg, could you, darling?’ Janice stared at her husband with loathing, while the others politely laughed. ‘You remember that first chicken you cooked, when my mother came round? Left the giblets inside in a little plastic bag, didn’t you? Cooked the little plastic bag and all? Didn’t you, my darling?’

  ‘That wasn’t for your mother,’ said Janice, in a reasonably equable tone. ‘I remember it well. It was for Kate and Bill Amies. It was embarrassing.’

  So far, so good. They all sat round and munched the red flesh.

  ‘No, no,’ said Edward, his grey eyes glinting, ‘it was definitely for my mother. I remember it well.’

  ‘No,’ said Janice, firmly, but with a note of slight (and to Clive quite understandable) distress creeping into her manner. ‘No, it wasn’t for your mother, it was for Kate and Bill Amies. I remember it well.’

  ‘A little of the gravy?’ asked Clive, desperately, passing the new fashionable Christmas present gras et maigre sauce-boat along the table to Janice. It ran with thin red blood. No gras, no alleviating emollient gras.

  ‘No, no, for my mother,’ repeated Edward. ‘We did laugh. Yes, you’ve learned a thing or two since then, Janice. You’ve learned a thing or two about cooking since then.’

  ‘It was Kate and Bill, and we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice. ‘It was the first time we ever had anyone round.’

  ‘My mother,’ said Edward, helping himself to another roast potato. ‘Yes, you’ve improved since those days.’ And he laughed, heartily, from his thin asthmatic chest.

  ‘Yes, we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice, staring straight across the table at Edward. ‘I didn’t know much about cooking. And as I remember, you didn’t know much about fucking, in those days. We weren’t much good, either of us. At cooking or fucking.’

  Edward’s face was, Clive had to admit to himself, a study. He turned dark red (which for so pale and grey a man was astonishing) and a vein stood up terribly in his forehe
ad.

  One didn’t use words like fucking, over dinner, like that, in 1987, in Yorkshire, in the presence of strangers. It wasn’t done. Or certainly not done to use such a word seriously. As Janice Enderby had done.

  A terrible silence fell over the gravy. Susie coughed, nervously. Edward twitched. The Newtons looked at their plates. The unspeakable had been said. Three sexual initiations, three wedding nights, three honeymoons, played themselves in mental images for the three couples around the table. Clive and Susie guessed that their memories were the least disagreeable, as they were the ones to find their tongues first.

  ‘Well, we all learn as we get older,’ said Susie, platitudinously but boldly: and, simultaneously, Clive volunteered ‘Well, I know I shouldn’t say so, but I think Janice’s beef is much better than Ma’s ever was, she always overcooked it, and her Yorkshire puddings were like soggy dollops of wet cement.’

  ‘I like soggy Yorkshire,’ said Alice, gamely, and the conversation staggered on. But Janice and Edward said nothing more all evening. They had done one another in, they had murdered one another.

  If looks could kill. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.

  And now Clive and Susie Enderby sipped their sherry, in the safety of their own home, looking back over the evening before, on the first ominous night of the New Year, contemplating their own marriage and its chances of survival.

  Fucking and cooking. Division of labour.

  Susie had kept her side of this primitive bargain: Clive wondered, a little uneasily, if he had kept his. The unease of the 1980s. She hadn’t seemed to fancy it much, after the birth of Vicky, but whose fault was that?

  These thoughts were uncomfortable: surely it was dinner time? He glanced at his watch ostentatiously, but Susie didn’t seem to notice. He guessed that she was going over it all, apportioning blame, beginning to blame him as well as Edward, blaming all Enderbys, blaming men in general and Enderbys in particular, abstracted by resentment as she sat neatly there in her mustard silk.

  But Susie’s mind had moved on. Susie was remembering, with a flutter of panic that she was sure was even now tinting her well-made-up complexion, an encounter on New Year’s Eve, at the Chamber of Commerce dance. An embarrassing encounter, a revival of yet more ancient crimes, and crimes worse (or so it had seemed to her) than cooked giblets in plastic bags, worse than insults over the roast beef. Crimes that she had repressed, disowned, forgotten, until they rose to confront her in the person of Fanny Scott Colvin, whose name she had never ever been able to forget. And there, appallingly, on New Year’s Eve, in the Victoria Hotel, in a black sequined evening dress with great shoulders like wings, like black angel’s wings, stood Fanny Scott Colvin, whom Susie had not seen for twenty years, with whom she had, mercifully, and, she hoped, for ever, lost touch at the age of twelve. She would never have recognized her, never have glimpsed in her that red-haired schoolgirl, but Fanny came swooping up to Susie, and claimed ancient friendship. ‘Susie!’ she shrieked, as though sure of her welcome, ‘It’s Susie Bates, isn’t it? Don’t you remember me? Fanny Scott Colvin I was then, and Fanny Kettle now! How are you, Susie? After all these years and years and years?’

  And Susie had stood there shocked, amazed that this woman could stand there claiming acquaintance, as though nothing had ever passed between them, as though they were adults in an adult world. Guilt over her association with Fanny Scott Colvin had nearly killed Susie Enderby née Bates, and yet there Fanny stood, calling herself Fanny Kettle, invoking old times, as though they had been times of innocence, of childhood innocence, in the school playground, in the bicycle shed, upstairs in the twin bedroom, in the secret dell.

  Two evenings of revelations. Susie thoughtfully stroked the sleeve of her silk blouse. Guilt. No, not guilt. Shame. Yes, that was it, shame. Shame, like a dark stain, pouring through her body, flooding her cheeks. And Fanny Kettle had seemed to feel none of it. ‘We must have tea, coffee, lunch, you must come and see me now I’m a neighbour again!’ declared Fanny Kettle, her red hair blazing, her prominent eyes bulging, her neck extended like a fighting swan’s, and Susie had smiled, coldly, drenched in ancient shame.

  Clive Enderby coughed. ‘Would you like another sherry, darling?’ he inquired. Susie looked at her gold Tissot watch. ‘Heavens, it’s late. Sorry,’ said Susie, in a voice that spoke from miles away, a choked small diminished voice. Yes, she’s blaming me, acknowledged Clive Enderby. Fucking and cooking. What a disastrous evening. Would they ever live it down?

  Janice Enderby lay on the large double bed, moaning and gurgling and thrashing her head backwards and forwards on the hot pillow. ‘Help me,’ she moaned, ‘help me, help me, can’t you help me, help me.’ On and on, a monotonous keening. A sour perfumed psychotic smell rose from the crumpled sheets. Edward Enderby sat and watched helplessly. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ he said, from time to time, ineffectually. His sharp grey pointed face was peaked with misery. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, help me, help me, help me,’ moaned Janice.

  A bad start to the new year, said the sardonic corner of Edward Enderby’s consciousness, as the rest of it kept dumb vigil. Yes, a bad start. But at least there’s no one to hear it through the wall. Now we’re detached. Detached misery. Semidetached misery had been hell.

  Paul Whitmore was composing a letter about his prison diet, addressed to the prison governor. He had asked Alix’s advice, and she had recommended this course of action. ‘Be polite,’ she had urged. ‘There’s nothing to gain by being rude.’

  Paul Whitmore was a vegetarian. He was not satisfied with the variety of diet offered. He would like more fresh vegetables and something other than lettuce and tomatoes in his salad. Eating meat is bad for the mind and body, and leads to aggression. So, laboriously, he informs the Governor. Eating meat is against Paul’s principles.

  Paul Whitmore spells it out, as he conjures memories of sides of beef hanging from hooks, of pigs’ heads grinning, of trays of kidneys and livers and lights. These memories fuse suddenly with the image of a woman, sitting in a chair, gazing at herself in a mirror. Her hair stands out from her head in a shining halo of stiff silver spikes, some six inches long. A fevered smell of burning fills the room.

  Paul Whitmore shakes his head, dully, like an animal on which a fly has settled, and the images separate and dissolve. Doggedly, he continues his letter to the Governor.

  ‘Last week,’ he writes, laboriously, ‘I had potatoes with tinned peas, twice . . . ’ Paul Whitmore leads a sedate, solitary life in prison, protected from his fellows by Rule 43.

  Alix Bowen, driving home towards her husband Brian and her son Sam, bottles for the Bottle Bank clinking merrily in her car boot, is glad she does not have to look forward to a supper of tinned peas. Tinned peas had been one of the torments of her childhood. They are one of the few foodstuffs she still finds repulsive. Repulsive pulse. She does not blame P. Whitmore for finding them unpalatable, but then, if he’s so fussy about what he eats, he shouldn’t have put himself in a position where he can’t pick and choose, should he? Refrain from Murder and Eat what you Want.

  It is dark now, and she cannot see the white landscape. The river running through the little town above the prison had been fringed with slabs of ice. How the Romans must have hated it, up here. P. Whitmore’s book claimed that they imported vast quantities of wine, olives, figs, mulberries, raisins and a pickled fish sauce made of mashed sprats, pepper, lovage, caraway, honey and vinegar. But these luxuries probably hadn’t reached them up here, the legionaries pitted against the Brigantes probably had to make do with barley and lentils and cabbage and lard. The tinned peas of yesteryear. Or was that view of the diet of Roman legions out of date now? Hadn’t somebody recently proved that the Roman legions, even in the far north, ate quite a lot of meat? A dim memory of an article in The TLS flutters in Alix’s mind. Is nothing safe, is all knowledge to be revised, will not the dead lie quietly with their stomachs full of cabbage, do we have to cho
p them up and anatomize them again and again and again?

  All sorts of delicacies had reached Northam and Brigantia since Alix’s wartime cabbage childhood. Now one could buy fresh coriander, cumin, mangoes, Chinese leaves, and more than one variety of mushroom. Despite the decay of the manufacturing industries, despite the slump.

  Alix ponders privation. She wonders if P. Whitmore expects her to slip him condoms full of heroin, which she gathers are all the rage amongst the criminal population these days, or whether he has decided she’s a dead loss as far as that kind of thing goes, and good only for bars of chocolate and books. P. Whitmore does not seem interested in drugs, though he had in his time been a heavy drinker. Vodka and peppermint had pepped him up on his night sorties.

  Alix wouldn’t know heroin if she saw it. Once, years ago, when her elder son Nicholas had just left home, she discovered while clearing out his bedroom a carefully secreted old Maxwell House coffee jar containing some strange white powdered substance. She had stared at it with suspicion. What was it? Was it illegal? She did not trust Nicholas at all. She sniffed it, and finally, greatly daring, put her finger in and conveyed a speck to her tongue.

  Detergent. Unmistakable detergent. Daz, or perhaps Persil.

  How deeply law-abiding I have been, thinks Alix to herself, as she drives homewards towards baked potatoes and, she hopes, a nicely roasted guinea fowl, with some spinach purée from the freezer. And, as she drives, pondering her willingness, nay eagerness, to see the upsetting P. Whitmore, a new lump of memory detaches itself from the frozen forgotten backward stretches, and bumps downstream into the light. As a child, as a nice, timid obsequious law-abiding deputy headmaster’s daughter, she had been haunted by the idea that one day she would find herself in the dock accused of a terrible crime which she had not committed. For years, this notion had haunted her, for years she had prepared her defence, her moving pleas for acquittal, her heart-rending reproaches upon conviction. Why? What on earth had all that been about? Alix smiled to herself at the absurdity of her childhood fantasies. What on earth had caused them? Had her mother unjustly blamed her for eating a slice of cake? Had her sister unjustly blamed her for losing her French Grammar? Had she been found masturbating?