A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  But his dream is in the future, and will not much help the struggling small businessman in trouble. Shirley now sits before Clive Enderby, with her back to the view, and listens patiently as he explains about her mother’s will. He assures her that everything is in order, that the house in Abercorn Avenue is sold, and that cheques will be on their way to Shirley and her sister Dr Headleand in a month or two at most.

  ‘These things always take time,’ he says. ‘You did receive the interim statement I sent you, didn’t you?’

  Shirley nods.

  ‘I’m afraid we’ve been a little held up in our regular work by the removal.’ he says, conversationally, as she continues to say nothing. ‘It was shifting the papers that was the problem. Mountains of stuff, going back to my grandfather’s day. You can’t throw it all away without looking, though, can you? Some of it probably has historical interest, if you go in for that kind of thing. You know, local history. Archives. But most of it went into the shredder, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It was the same with the stuff at my mother’s house,’ says Shirley, with an attempt at interest, at politeness. ‘The things people hoard. We burned boxes full of paper.’

  ‘Really?’ Clive looks at her with sudden acuteness.

  ‘Boxes,’ repeats Shirley, dully. The very thought makes her feel tired.

  ‘Lucky she kept the will in a sensible place,’ says Clive, slightly probing.

  ‘Yes, very lucky,’ says Shirley, bored.

  Clive explains to her the capacities of his new shredding machine, but she does not listen. Gradually she works the conversation round to Cliff’s ailing business, to her own liabilities as a director.

  ‘I was so worried,’ she says, blushing slightly, ‘that I went round to the Information Centre at the public library. And they gave me this leaflet. And frankly, it worried me even more.’

  She hands over the leaflet. It is entitled ‘Implications of the Insolvency Act 1986 and the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986’.

  ‘I mean,’ says Shirley, ‘what about our house? And all my personal assets? Can they be included in the company assets? I’m a non-executive director, I know, but look, it says the Acts make no distinction between executive and non-executive. I don’t know what it all means. To be frank with you I don’t even know what the word “executive” means. I don’t know where I stand. At all.’

  ‘Hmm,’ murmurs Clive Enderby, playing for time. He asks for the name of Cliff’s own solicitors, for the company’s name and registration number, for the names of its other directors. He scribbles them down on a piece of paper and looks knowing. Then he tries to explain to her the distinction between wrongful trading and fraudulent trading, but she is not listening, she cannot follow, she takes in only one word in ten. He explains that he cannot offer useful advice in the absence of more detailed information about the company’s liabilities. He encourages her to call a meeting with the other directors.

  ‘But Cliff is my husband,’ says Shirley. ‘How can I call a meeting with my husband? He won’t speak about these things, anyway. He’s very depressed At least, I think he’s depressed. He won’t admit it. But he is.’

  ‘Perhaps you should get him to see his doctor,’ says Clive, brightly, eager to shift responsibility for the Harpers’ financial and marital problems on to another profession. After all, they aren’t even his clients. They are small fry, little victims of recession, tiddlers.

  Clive watches Shirley closely, as she promises to speak to Dr Peckham. He’s not surprised that she can’t follow her husband’s affairs, but frankly he is rather surprised that neither she nor her clever sister Liz has spotted the intriguing anomaly in their mother’s financial statements. He had noted it at once, and it had led him to an interesting revelation. Now, of course, he does not know whether or not to share it. It is, arguably, of no importance, better left sleeping. Neither Shirley nor Liz has shown the slightest suspicion.

  ‘Give my regards to your sister,’ he says, as he ushers Shirley to the lift.

  Perhaps women never read account sheets, financial reports. Women are interested only in the bottom line, and they can’t always find that. Women will sign anything—hire-purchase agreements, life insurance policies, applications for shares, joint mortgages with defaulting husbands—and they never read the small print, as Clive knows all too well. And even if they try to read it, as Shirley has just demonstrated, they do not understand it.

  They shake hands, outside the gleaming lift. Shirley voices her thanks, but the interview has left her more worried than before.

  And Clive too, trying to put her from his mind, feels a certain unease. The images of Janice and Susie swim, unsummoned, towards him. Wives, women, marriage. The voicing of dissatisfactions. The crumbling of loyalties. The breaking of bonds. Where will it end? He opens a desk drawer by his left elbow, and stares at a new brown legal envelope in which lies a rather grubby document, a Deed of Covenant dated 23 December 1934. Should he have handed it over? He shuts the drawer, and lets it lie there, inert.

  Alix Bowen stops her two-finger typing of a draft of a letter to one of old Beaver’s one-time correspondents and looks up to gaze at her snowdrops. They jostle in the wineglass on their thin stems. She lifts the face of one of them, gazes inquiringly into its intricate green and yellow and white, and lets it fall back. With a sigh, the whole wineglassful rearranges itself, with inimitable, once-only grace, to create a new pattern. The flowers shiver and quake into stillness. They cannot fall wrongly. They cannot make themselves into a false shape.

  ‘If you do happen to have kept any of Howard’s letters,’ Alix types, ‘we would be so grateful for photocopies of them. As I am sure you will appreciate, they would be of great value to any future biographer, and there may be the possibility of a volume of Collected Letters at some point in the future.’ She crosses out ‘in the future’ as tautologous, crosses out the ‘future’ in front of ‘biographer’ on the same grounds, and then puts it back in again, as the sentence looks a little too bare, a little too definite, without it. There is no certainty that there will be a biography, no certainty that Beaver’s recent renaissance of reputation will last, although he clearly believes it will. It is Alix’s task to set his papers in order, a task with which Beaver himself co-operates only intermittently. A Herculean task, for the disorder is considerable. But Beaver seems to like Alix, and does not mind her rooting around in his upper rooms.

  Alix does not know whether or not she likes Beaver. ‘Liking’ does not seem to be relevant to what she thinks about him, feels for him. Indeed, the word is not wholly applicable to Beaver’s feeling for Alix either. She is useful to him, in more ways than the way in which she is paid to be useful. She is company, she is a welcome irritant, she shops for him sometimes, she sometimes does his washing up.

  He is a dreadful mess, is Beaver. An egg-stained, tobacco-stained, shabby, shapeless mess. A memento mori. Alix, who does not find the company of old people easy, is frequently disgusted by him. He eats noisily, slopping and slurping his food, and blows his nose violently, and spits in the sink. Coarse, fleshly, decaying.

  Grammar-school educated, university educated, the son of a miner, once destined for a life as a schoolmaster, read Classics, waylaid for some years by poetry. A brilliant mind, he must have had, reflects Alix. There is little evidence of that brilliant mind now, for Beaver has engineered and capitalized upon his return to popularity by cultivating a deliberate boorishness, an aggressive provincialism. Alix is the only person to whom he speaks of literary matters, and even with her he sometimes relapses into a gross mockery of the mind, a philistine, snook-cocking, infantile savagery. Alix cannot tell whether it is all a pose, whether he thinks that this is how a working-class northern intellectual ought to behave, or whether he has relapsed into behaving like this because he finds it more comfortable, and no longer cares. Is he copy or archetype? She cannot tell.

  His career has been curious, enough to drive anyone into eccentricity. After a year o
r two of schoolmastering in Wakefield, he had taken off for London and lived the life of a literary hanger-on, working in publishers’ offices, writing reviews when permitted, scrounging review copies, copy-e’diting, borrowing money, publishing the odd poem. He had then vanished to Paris for a couple of years in the late twenties, where he claimed to have got to know the American expatriate literary community and to have worked as assistant editor on transition—although Alix finds this period of his life suspiciously ill documented, and his knowledge of French is now rudimentary and rusty in the extreme. (But he may be joking, that awful accent may be a fake, a stage prop, like that custard-stained check waistcoat and that cloth cap.) He had returned to England, and had become, in the thirties, briefly, successful. References to him and his work during this period were easy to uncover in the little magazines, in the review pages, in the now published letters and diaries of his then eminent contemporaries. ‘Met Howard at the Roebuck.’ ‘Saw Beaver walking along the Embankment with Rose Feaver.’ ‘Discussed Pound with Howard Beaver.’

  And then, after this fragile notoriety, he had vanished. He had vanished utterly, into obscurity. He had returned north, and taken an office job with a company that published technical journals and children’s comics. He had married his old school friend Bertha Sykes, and had children, and grown old. He had missed out on the vogue of provincialism that had swept Britain during the 1950s. He now claimed that he had not even known that it had existed. Kitchen sinks, Angry Young Men, no, he had never heard of them. He lived in the past, in the past of the 1920s that had been his own twenties, in the distant past of Greece and Rome and Ancient Britain.

  Now he has been rediscovered, a living fossil. He has been televised, recorded, reprinted, honoured. He is seen as a sort of missing link in literary evolution, a coelacanth hauled up from the depths of a cultural Continental shelf.

  Or is he, as Alix sometimes wonders, Piltdown Man? A hoax?

  Well, he can’t be a complete hoax, because somebody must have written his poems, and by all accounts that somebody seems to have been him. It seems unlikely that this crusty old relic could have produced such work, but somebody must have done, and it must have been either him or the person that used to live inside him. Alix sometimes peers at him to see if she can see any sign of that delicate, shy and vanishing spirit, but Howard Beaver, in his robust eighties, glares defiantly back, his red-rimmed bloodshot eyes mocking her curiosity, her disbelief.

  Alix types on. ‘We would very much appreciate any help you can give us,’ she continues.

  Beaver wants to edit his own past, to make sure that an authorized version survives him. Alix is slightly surprised that he should care about his posthumous reputation. It depresses her, to find vanity lurking in such a hulk. But she collaborates, because she is paid to do so. And because she is curious. And because she is, by now, involved. Beaver needs her, although he would never admit it. His rudeness, as she occasionally admits to herself, is in part an admission of that need.

  Susie Enderby is appalled to find herself sitting in Fanny Kettle’s drawing-room. She cannot think how it has happened. She has been drawn here like an innocent bird by a hypnotic snake. Fanny Kettle’s protuberant, lascivious eyes stare at Susie Enderby.

  Fanny is wearing green, dark green, in a shade traditionally favoured by those of her colouring, and she looks at once archaic and avant-garde. Her shoulders are padded, huge, soaring, as they had been at the evening of the Chamber of Commerce ball: her waist appears tiny, her legs are long and her long clinging skirt is carefully arranged to reveal a stretch of hard brown nylon shin. Susie, who takes a pride in her appearance and considers herself one of the best-dressed young professional wives of the region, suddenly feels herself to be a little dull, a little stocky. Fanny pours herself another cup of tea, her long fingers and crimson nails hovering over silver pot, china cup and saucer, sugar tongs. After all, it is only tea time, says Susie to herself, bracingly: nothing awful ever happens at tea time.

  Fanny has been describing the reasons for her reappearance in Northam, after years of exile in the flat fens of the East Riding. She shudders with horror as she recalls the desolation. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she says, ‘how lonely it was, how isolated, how cut off from all social life of any sort . . . if you didn’t make an effort, you could speak to nobody, nobody at all, for weeks on end. Well, days on end. If it hadn’t been for my little trips abroad, my little trips to London, I’d have gone mad, quite mad.’

  Susie wants to ask why on earth Fanny and her husband Ian had spent so long in such an out-of-the-way region, but she does not want to betray her ignorance. Fanny seems to expect Susie to know all about Ian Kettle’s work. She talks about him as though he were famous. As Susie has never heard of Ian Kettle, she has to tread warily, Gradually she pieces together the information that he has been on television, but is not a television personality: that he was vaguely connected with York University, and is now vaguely connected with the University of Northam: that he is, perhaps . . . yes, this must be it, and now it somehow begins to come back to Susie, as though she had known it all along, that’s right, he is some kind of archaeologist, who has spent years excavating burials in the wet dull flat eastern bits of the county . . .

  ‘Of course, our house was rather grand, and that was a consolation,’ says Fanny. ‘We had house parties. Quite famous parties.’

  Susie does not know whether to believe this or not, and slightly hopes it is not true. How could one have famous house parties in that damp wilderness?

  ‘Ian’s people are called the Parisi. I always thought that was a hint,’ said Fanny. ‘Parisian parties. You know.’ She insinuates.

  Susie does not know. She has no idea what Fanny is talking about. Ian’s people? Parisian parties?

  ‘Yes, the house was good, but it was too far out . . . ’ Fanny sighs, looks round her new residence, which is a detached Victorian granite building high on the ridge by the university, in a suburb once fashionable, now slightly ‘mixed’. It is an area dominated by the great architectural fantasies of the fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century iron masters and by houses like this, the solid comfortable spacious houses of the solidly prosperous. ‘Now this house,’ says Fanny, ‘has some party potential, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’

  Susie nods, smiles. She is out of her depth. She herself sometimes gives little dinner parties for six or, eight, and a cocktail party once or twice a year. She’ considers herself, by Northam standards, a successful hostess. But is she? What new scale has Fanny Kettle introduced?

  Fanny Kettle has a son of nearly seventeen. Susie expresses disbelief. ‘Yes, I can hardly believe it myself, such a big boy now . . . of course I married very young, with all the usual consequences . . . only twenty, I was.’ Fanny Kettle laughs. ‘I’m afraid poor Ian has found me rather a handful,’ she says, and laughs again, with display of teeth and rather gaunt neck.

  Susie feels sorry for Ian Kettle. She thinks she has no recollection of him, from their one meeting—or was he perhaps that shadowy figure lurking at Fanny’s elbow?

  Fanny inquires, formally, after Susie’s own children, without displaying much interest: Susie says she has two, William, aged eight, and Vicky, aged six. ‘How sensible you have been,’ says Fanny, as though sense were a commodity she mildly despised. To wait, to have them a little later, when one can afford more help . . . ’

  ‘Yes,’ says Susie, conscious that she has been emerging dully, uncompetitively from this interchange. ‘Yes, we are very fortunate, we’re very well placed now, and I have this excellent’—she hesitates over terminology—’this excellent girl . . . a trained girl, you know—who lives in. So life is very agreeable.’

  ‘And you’re quite free, then? To do what you want?’

  Fanny stares at Susie with her shockingly personal, investigative, unmannerly stare. Susie feels herself blushing, hopes her make-up will conceal the colour in her cheeks.

  ‘Yes,’ says Susie, firmly, primly (why does Fanny make
her sound so smug, so prim, so suburban?), ‘yes, I do speech therapy at the clinic where I used to work, two half-days a week . . . and apart from that, yes, I am quite free.’

  Free. The word hovers in the room, over the very slightly tarnished silver teapot, over the three-piece suite, over the coffee-table and the occasional tables, over the silk-fringed shades of the standard lamps. Free. An uneasy word, an uneasy concept, a confession, a concession. What has Susie surrendered? Something, she knows. Fanny has noted, has recorded, will exploit. Despite herself, Susie feels a faint tremor of excitement, a physical thrill, a stirring of the flesh. Fanny continues to chatter on, about her parties at Eastwold Grange, about her weekends in Paris, about her plans for future parties, about the complaisance of poor Ian . . . Susie does not know what to believe, does not know what is fact and what is fantasy, succumbs to a mild gin and tonic, refuses a second (‘I have to drive back’; ‘Ah, next time you must have a proper drink and go home in a taxi!’), and as she drives back through the waste land that links Northam and Hansborough, images of a strange, sinister, isolated Grange float into her mind, a Grange with brightly lit windows moated in mist. Laughter echoes into the surrounding emptiness, laughter on stairs and in bedrooms. Carnival, abandon, licence. Susie is outside, out on the flat grey mist-spangled lawn, looking in. Fanny, within, lies back on a brocaded settee, in a silken dress that parts to show the lace of her underskirt. Her head is thrown back. It is cold outside. Susie shivers and turns up the fan on her car heater, as she drives home to a solitary supper. Clive is out at a meeting, and the girl will have fed the children, will be waiting to go out with her boyfriend. Susie will eat eggs on toast in front of the television. Fanny’s ringed hand with its crimson nails reaches for a glass, and a high-heeled shoe drops from her thin hard ankle. A hand—an unattached, disembodied hand—reaches for Fanny’s lean thigh, beneath the silk.