A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  Heroic courtroom dramas she had staged in her head. Innocent Alix Doddridge, a mere waif of a girl, accused of—of what? Murder, infanticide, treason? Alix could hardly recall. Nor could she now remember whether the essence of these daydreams was that she felt innocent or felt guilty. She suspected that she must have felt guilty, or the fantasies would not have been so elaborate, indeed would not have arisen at all.

  Paul Whitmore did not feel guilty, although he admitted guilt. Alix felt guilty when she was not, and knew she was not.

  Alix added this perception to the conundrum, drew this new line into her equation.

  Paul Whitmore was not getting much psychiatric help at Porston. The chap that he saw once a week sounded a fool. Alix had, by and large, a perhaps exaggerated respect for the psychiatric profession, fostered by her friendship with Liz Headleand and Liz Headleand’s first husband Edgar Lintot, both people possessed, in Alix’s view, of compassion and common sense. This chap up at Porston, from P.W.’s account, did not seem to have much of either. Though that doesn’t mean he’s not a professional. Maybe he knows what he’s doing, after all, thinks Alix Bowen.

  But she doubts it.

  Alix sees herself in the dock, pleading her case. She is convicted, perhaps, of participating in the Human Condition. Is that it?

  Alix gnaws on, like the stubborn Utah mouse.

  Nature and nurture. She would like to acquit Mankind, and if she can acquit P. Whitmore, then she can acquit absolutely anybody. Anybody and everybody. Nurture and nature. Alix cannot help believing in the nurture argument, as the nature argument is so unfair.

  Why on earth should Paul Whitmore have been born a murderer?

  Or made one, come to that?

  Alix feels it is very, very unfair.

  The one thing she cannot believe is that Paul Whitmore, of his own free (God-given?) will, chose to hack the heads off various young women by and near the Harrow Road, and chose thus to end up eating tinned peas in Porston Prison. She is sorry, but that she simply cannot believe. And that is my last word on this subject for tonight, she says aloud to the empty passenger seat of her car, as she enters the yellow fluorescent glare of the suburbs of Northam, and sees the steep hillside of home.

  ‘Rat a tat tat, Who is that, Only grandma’s pussycat,’ chants Alix’s friend Liz Headleand, to the step-granddaughter bouncing on her knee. The baby laughs, obligingly, but Liz has forgotten the rest of the rhyme. It is a long time since she bounced a baby on her knee. ‘Rat a tat tat,’ she repeats. The baby does not seem to mind repetition. Liz is delighted to have a step-grandchild. It is about time. Jonathan, her stepson, the father of this child, is into his thirties. Liz had begun to think that none of her stepchildren or children would ever reproduce. Something had put them off family life and babies—her own behaviour, their father’s behaviour, the overcrowding of Britain, the violence of city life, the nuclear threat, the decline of Empire? Any or all of these things could have done it. But Jonathan and his silly wife Xanthe had overcome these hesitations, or else the Life Force had overcome them independently: either way, there bounced and wriggled young Cornelia Headleand, triumphant, in her fancy little smocked and embroidered dress.

  Xanthe does dress the child oddly, Liz thinks. But then, Xanthe dresses oddly herself. All bows and ribbons and bits of glitter on her stockings. Liz thought all that kind of thing had gone out decades ago, but she supposes it could have gone in and gone out again several times while she wasn’t looking. Do other people really wear these funny balloony puffed up Bo-Peep very short skirts? Liz has never seen them around anywhere. Liz thinks Xanthe is a bit batty. Yes, that’s the word for her. Batty. Those bright eyes, those shiny dark-red lips, those very white teeth, that strange vacant giggle. Liz prefers the toothless young Cornelia. But recognizes that probably Xanthe Headleand is quite the thing. In whatever circle it is that she and Jonathan move in.

  She’s not very good with the baby, Liz thinks. Doesn’t know how to keep her happy, holds her awkwardly, looks nervous when she cries. At home, Xanthe has a nanny for the baby. I mustn’t interfere, says Liz to herself, as she marvels at the child’s soft blooming skin. No wonder mothers want to devour their babies with kisses, feel the urge to gobble them all up. Cannibal mothers.

  Liz had been, just before Christmas, to the archaeology exhibition at the British Museum, ‘New Views of the Past’, and had stared, along with all the other morbid sightseers, at the strangely preserved, smooth, brown, plump, patterned immortal skin of Lindow Man. Bard or Druid, victim or sacrifice. Ageless, timeless, rescued from the bog.

  Liz is withering, the veins stand up on the back of her hands, and she is even developing dark freckly spots. She is putting on weight, but she is also withering. It is an interesting process, and she watches it with an amused fascination.

  The baby bounces. She is soft, seductive, delicious. She smells of milk and biscuit and sweet breath.

  At the far end of the room, sitting together on the window seat, Jonathan and his brother Alan are in conference. Liz’s tabby cat lies on the rug before the fireplace. A great gold-rimmed jug of yellow chrysanthemums, curved overbred formal globes, stands in the fireplace. Their acrid perfume mingles with the smell of baby, with Alan’s Gauloise, with the sweeter scent from a small cut-glass vase of freesias, with the general smell of dust and room and home and cat and London. The lights are warm and low. A charming domestic scene.

  But the conference is serious. Jonathan and Alan speak in low, worried voices. The men of the family. They are discussing their father Charles, who has, they think, gone mad. Alan runs his fingers through his hair, Jonathan leans forward intently, gesticulating wildly as he speaks. Alan shrugs. Alan is laid back. Mostly.

  Liz cannot hear what they are saying. The baby is getting tired, soon she will summon Xanthe to take her away.

  Liz is not so worried about her ex-husband Charles Headleand. She has spent enough of her life worrying about him, because of him. He can look after himself. Or if he can’t, well, that’s too bad.

  The baby struggles, and makes herself into an angry, tired shapeless shape. Liz joggles her, soothes her, rests her over her shoulder, sings gently in a dull undertone. Cornelia wriggles, settles, wriggles, sucks her thumb.

  Liz has always been good with babies. She is glad she has not lost the knack.

  Liz’s thoughts move to her friend Alix Bowen, who had telephoned earlier that week to say she might come up to London soon. She feels vaguely aggrieved with Alix, and cannot think why. Is it something to do, as Alix supposes, with the murderer, in whom Alix takes such a proprietorial interest? Liz sometimes feels like saying that some of her patients are just as mad and just as interesting as Alix’s murderer, and that if she were to tell all . . . Yes, there may be an element of that, but it is also likely that Liz resents Alix’s having moved out of reach—and resents the fact that, having moved, Alix seems quite happy, and even occasionally delivers herself of comparisons between Northam and London in which London comes out badly. Sour grapes, of course, Liz says to herself, but nevertheless it is irritating. Liz has been deserted by both her close women friends, both her friends of college days, whom she used to see regularly, on whom she relied for gossip and support and provocation, for reading lists and shared memories. Alix had gone north, and the third of what was once a triumvirate, art historian Esther Breuer, had gone to live in Bologna. Liz has been left alone, holding the fort of London single-handed.

  The baby settles, slumps, nestles, and begins to breathe evenly and deeply. Damn, she’s gone to sleep, says Liz to herself: I should have got Xanthe to take her away, now I’m lumbered.

  Liz ponders the subject of infantile sexuality. The oral phase. Cornelia has an engaging way of sucking not her thumb but her knuckle.

  Although Liz does not yet know it, 1987 is to be the Year of Child Sex Abuse. For some years now the subject has been arousing interest and controversy amongst the professionals, but in 1987 it will catch the press and the popular imag
ination like a fever. 1987 will be a psychotic year, the year of abnormality, of Abuse, of the Condom. Perhaps it is already possible to detect the early symptoms.

  And as if in anticipation, Liz sits there rocking her step-granddaughter and wondering what normality is. Is this it? This comfortable bourgeois room, with flowers?

  If one reads ancient texts—the Bible, the Koran, Sophocles, the Veda—is one not sometimes led to suspect that the whole of human history is nothing but a history of deepening psychosis? That something went wrong at the beginning of human nature, of human nurture, that humanity mistook itself fatally, for ever?

  False revelations, hoax riddles, grinning sphinxes from prehistory. Murder, arson, pillage, savagery.

  The baby sleeps and sucks, her pearly dewy eyelids a pale veined blue.

  A pity one can’t reinvent the whole thing from infancy, thinks Liz, and get it right. A world without violence, murder, aggression. Some of her calling believed that if you brought babies up properly, if you loved them and fed them and weaned them correctly, there would be no more Paul Whitmores, no more Hitlers or Pol Pots, no more wars: Liz does not believe this. She thinks this is simplistic. The whole thing has got quite out of hand. It is irreversible. Abnormality is in-built, by now.

  Alix, up in Northam, returning again to Tacitus, reaches the same conclusion. Tacitus strikes her as sane. Now what does she mean by this? He is reporting mass historic madnesses that make Paul Whitmore’s aberrations seem trivial. Yet he himself is sane. On the other hand, if you define sanity, if you define normality, so narrowly that only one or two exceptional people can ever achieve it, what does that signify?

  The baby’s little temples beat. Her little life is fragile, hardly yet incarnate. Her skull is soft, frail, open.

  Charles Headleand has been reading the Koran. He is reading the Koran because he plans to go to the Middle East to rescue his old enemy, cameraman Dirk Davis, from the clutches of a bunch of terrorists, who have been holding him hostage for over two years. The Koran has driven the Iranians mad. Who would have predicted, back in the 1970s, the tide of Islamic fundamentalism that has swept the land masses of the East, that threatens even the secular monolith of the Soviet Union? Charles certainly did not, although he knows he ought to have done, because he has always been gripped by News, by day-to-day News, has always been a privileged receiver and passionate disseminator of News. But he had not foreseen the rebirth of Islam, the rise of the Ayatollah, the war between Iraq and Iran, the boy soldiers clutching the Koran, the Turkish women returning despite menaces to the veil, the murmuring in the Soviet colonies, the floggings and the amputations of Pakistan. What is it all about?

  He has discussed this with various Middle East experts of his acquaintance, with Hugo Mainwaring the journalist, with Harry Painter the historian, and with a varied collection of television reporters from various countries, some of whom had once worked for Charles’s own company, Global International Network (a company now, incidentally, in severe financial difficulties). He has discussed it with experts in famine relief, with members of the International Red Cross, with employees of Amnesty International. Some of them, he suspects, had not foreseen all this either, although some of them (himself, most of the time, included) lay claim to hindsight, cast backwards premonitions that they had never truly felt, or had felt late, late, late.

  He had even discussed Islam with one believer, a friend from college days, a gentle-mannered woman married to the American-born WASP director of a multinational conglomerate. She was bringing her children up in the faith. Why? He had wanted to know why? She had explained that the extremists, the fundamentalists, were as far from her conception of the true Islam as Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons or American Bible Belt faith-healers were from the Church of England. How can that be, he had wanted to know, as Ishrat smiled gently and poured him another cup of tea. He had not been able to comprehend her replies. They are fanatics, said Ishrat, but that need not make me an unbeliever.

  It was his ex-wife Liz Headleand who suggested that he should pursue his inquiries by reading the Koran. Frankly, this notion had not occurred to him, nor had it been put to him by any of the experts on Middle Eastern affairs. But, in the grip of obsession, he had humbly taken himself to the nearest bookshop, the Owl in Kentish Town, and purchased a Penguin Classic: The Koran, translated with notes by N. J. Dawood, first published in 1956, many times reprinted. He attempted to open his mind, he attempted to make his way through it: Charles was not used to reading, he was accustomed to news flashes and teletext bulletins and telex reports and memoranda. He found the Koran heavy going, and was more than slightly put off to learn that the chapters of the version he was reading had been rearranged, their traditional sequence abandoned. The original editors of this sacred text had, apparently, arranged its chapters not chronologically but in order of length, ‘the longest coming first and the shortest last’. He complained about this narrative anarchy over the phone to Liz: Liz, not having read the Koran herself, was intrigued by this revelation. ‘You mean you can read them in any order, like the chapters of an experimental novel?’ she asked. ‘Like that novel in a box, by whoever it was in the sixties?’

  Charles, who had never read an experimental novel, and very few traditional ones, cut the conversation short. ‘How can you understand the minds of people who don’t respect sequence?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘I’m sure there must be some kind of sequence,’ said Liz, vaguely. ‘Why don’t you read on, and see if one emerges?’

  Charles read on, but not very far. He managed to find one or two pleasant passages about rich brocades and sherbet and fountains and young boys as fair as virgin pearls, but he found a great deal more about unbelievers and wrongdoers and the Hour of Doom and the Curse of Allah and thunderbolts and pitch and scalding water and the Pit of Hell. ‘Will they not ponder on the Koran? Are there locks upon their hearts?’ Charles decided that there was a lock upon his heart: was it because he had been seduced by Satan, as the Koran suggested? Surely not.

  He even found himself thinking of the New Testament with some affection, and went so far as to open it, drunkenly, one night, to see what it had to say to him. He stubbed at his old school Bible with his finger, looking for a message. He lit on Matthew 6:25. ‘Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

  The words glowed with a hesitant, radiant beauty, a beauty of remembered faith. Was there not something about God caring even for the sparrows? About each hair of our head being numbered? Inspired stuff, divine stuff, said Charles to himself, hunting for the text, but failing to find it. ‘Christ.’ thought Charles, at midnight, ‘the Koran has converted me back to Christianity.’

  The effect of the New Testament did not last. Charles was not a reader, but a man of action. He had persuaded himself that the amateur video of the death of kidnapped Dirk Davis, which had been thrown over the embassy wall in Baldai, was a fake, and had been given enough hope by reported sightings and messages to build on this persuasion an elaborate structure of explanation. He was abetted in this by Dirk Davis’s wife. Dirk Davis’s wife also refused to believe that Dirk was dead. She and Charles encouraged one another, in speculation, in fantasy.

  Dirk Davis’s wife was not quite what one might expect, from her brief grieving public appearances: but then Charles knew enough about television duplicity not to be surprised by the real Carla. Wives and widows are never quite what one might expect: what we see is a strange public construction of what we think we would like to see, what the news presenter decides would be suitable for us to see. We are all partly aware of this, and Charles knows it more than most. Nevertheless, the gulf between the public Mrs Davis and the real Carla was unusually wide. The public Mrs Davis was a woman of, say, fifty, dressed plain
ly and soberly in black, with a bruised, pale face, huge dark pained saucered eyes, long straggly black, limp, grief-unkempt hair, and a husky, pleading whisper of a voice: a woman of sorrows, a victim, worn down by prolonged misery and hopeless vigil. The real Carla was an animated, hard-drinking, loquacious, vitriolic, dangerous creature, aggressive, witty and only occasionally tearful: life had dealt her some hard blows, and Dirk’s disappearance was not the first of them, but she was a fighter, and would not surrender.

  Carla Davis lived in Kentish Town, under half a mile from Charles Headleand’s flat.

  Is Carla manipulating Charles, or is it the other way round? Is it folie à deux? Is Carla trying to send Charles off to his death, because she blames him for Dirk Davis’s death?

  These are the questions that Jonathan and Alan Headleand ask themselves. They are of the opinion that the video of Dirk Davis’s death is genuine. Jonathan has reached this conclusion after many inspections of the tape, professional inspections (for he has followed in his father’s footsteps and now makes TV documentaries), Alan after two viewings through half-closed eyes, a barrier of fingers, and a natural blindness when confronted with the unacceptable. Jonathan ascribes Charles Headleand’s obsession to the financial problems of Global International and Charles’s loss of status. Alan thinks it is more closely linked to sex and the Zeitgeist, to the need for self-assertion and machismo so common in middle-aged men.