A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  Liz, Alix and the old lady had all smiled: the old lady had spoken up. ‘Not very lucky up to that point, young man!’ she had admonished him, pointing to the writings on the wall announcing the probable sequence of events that had led to his death and his body’s recovery. The schoolfriends had laughed, Alix and Liz had laughed, and the little boy himself had smiled broadly, unabashed, his freckled face with its gap tooth and small nose open as a flower, open as a book that all might read, open as innocence. He knew what he meant. And of course, as Alix and Liz agreed over their lentil soup, they knew what he meant too, there was something rather wonderful, rather lucky even, about such defiance of time, about Lindow Man’s role as a link and a messenger from the underworld, about such arbitrary, quirkish, museum-venerated fame.

  ‘I wonder if people would pay to be put in museums after their death?’ ponders Alix.

  ‘Well, the Egyptians did, in a sense,’ says Liz. ‘And the Chinese. And the holy saints of the Catholic Church that hang around under altars in Italy.’

  ‘The saints didn’t pay! says Alix, reprovingly. ‘They were preserved by sanctity.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Liz.

  Liz and Alix have had a good afternoon. Alix is pleased to have caught up with the exhibition before it closes and wonders if she has not become more conscientious about attending cultural events in London now that she does not live so near them. She has come down on the Rapide Coach and is spending the night with Liz. They have a lot to talk about.

  They discuss Bog People in general, the poems of Seamus Heaney, the Bog Man of Buller, P. V. Glob, the excavations of Ian Kettle, P. Whitmore’s interest in corpses and Ancient Britain, and Alix’s notion that the story of Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes should be adapted for television.

  ‘Why don’t you write it yourself?’ asks Liz.

  ‘I’m too busy. And anyway, I can’t write.’

  ‘Get Beaver to write it. It’s his period.’

  ‘Oh, he’s well past it.’

  They discuss Beaver, briefly. Beaver claims to have an exmistress living in elderly seclusion on the shores of Lake Maggiore.

  ‘You should get him to send you to visit her,’ suggests Liz. ‘In some pleasant month. Like May. Or June.’

  ‘He says she’s the subject of his Novara sequence,’ says Alix. ‘But she disputes this. At length, and illegibly.’

  The conversation moves to their friend Esther Breuer, who now lives in Bologna, and who has it would seem dropped from their lives as from this volume. They do not hear from her often. She has been translated into another world. They miss her, but not perhaps as much as they thought they would. Maybe she will come back, maybe not. She is living with an Italian Etruscan scholar, Elena Volpe, sister of Esther’s dead admirer, Professor Claudio Volpe. Esther had lived for years, unknowingly, in a flat in the same building as P. Whitmore, in North Kensington, at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, and his arrest had in part led to her departure. The house in which Esther and P. Whitmore lived has now been demolished, and a row of what Liz says must be Small Industrial Units has been erected on the site. They will, according to Liz, never be occupied, and already look derelict. ‘The area is too much for them,’ reports Liz to Alix. They haven’t a hope, they died before they began.’

  Liz and Alix drop the subject of Esther, as she has dropped them, and move on to Charles and Carla Davis (a subject new to Alix, who has not seen Charles for a year or two). They allude to the long silence of their friend Stephen Cox, who is somewhere in Kampuchea, and is said to be writing a play about Pol Pot.

  ‘Are they quite mad, these men, to want to go to such disagreeable places?’ asks Liz, rhetorically.

  They speak of Liz’s step-grandchild Cornelia, and Alix expresses regret that her older son Nicholas and his consort Use have not yet had a baby. They have made do, so far, with one of Liz’s tabby cat’s kittens, which has already had kittens of its own.

  Then they move, with slightly sinking spirits, to the financial problems of Liz’s sister Shirley and her husband Cliff Harper.

  ‘I told her to get independent advice,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t know why she doesn’t just leave him. He’s making her life a misery. Why not quit? The children have all left home, why doesn’t she just clear off?’

  ‘People don’t just leave their husbands, up in Northam,’ says Alix.

  ‘Don’t they? I thought that had all changed.’

  ‘Swift and Hodgkin argue that the divorce rate is 20 per cent higher among the professional and semi-professional classes and the petty bourgeoisie in the south than it is in the north and the north-east,’ says Alix.

  ‘Really? And what do Swift and Hodgkin have to say about Scotland?’

  ‘They don’t cover Scotland,’ says Alix.

  They both laugh, although they agree it is not a laughing matter. But, as Liz points out, she is not her sister’s keeper, and anyway she doesn’t understand business. ‘I thought of asking Charles to give her some advice,’ says Liz, ‘but frankly, Charles is in a terrible mess himself. He owes money all over the place. It’s on a grander scale than Cliff’s mess, so I don’t suppose he’ll ever have to pay up, but it does rather make one distrust his judgement.’

  Alix says that her opinion on such matters is not worth having, and that moreover she has a feeling that Shirley doesn’t really like her. ‘She doesn’t really like me, either,’ says Liz. ‘In fact, that’s probably why she doesn’t like you.’

  They abandon Shirley as a lost cause, and move on to grander themes: prison visiting, insanity, Foucault, Lacan, the oddity of French intellectuals, the grandeur of Freud, the audacity of Bernard Shaw, the death penalty and social attitudes towards.

  ‘I mean, really,’ asks Liz, mellowed by a plateful of Toulouse sausage and swede-and-potato mash, ‘really, do you think P. Whitmore ought to be alive or dead? Do you think there’s any point in keeping P. Whitmore alive?’ She stirs the green salad.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Alix, slowly. ‘I suppose one can argue that he’s a kind of—a kind of living experiment. A kind of Lindow Man in a glass coffin. That we can learn from him if we can learn how to. I suppose that’s what I think.’

  ‘Shaw would have had him polished off. Painlessly, of course,’ repeats Liz, who has already made this point earlier in the conversation.

  ‘As no use to society, I suppose?’ says Alix. ‘As a meaningless sport of nature, like a dog with two heads? Well, yes, I can see that.’

  ‘And he, what does he think? All those American murderers seem to long to end up on Death Row. They are after the publicity. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Or so we are told.’

  ‘I don’t think P. Whitmore wants to be hanged,’ says Alix. ‘No, I don’t really think he wants that. He wouldn’t be so interested in the Romans and so worried about his tinned peas if that’s what he wanted. Would he? But then, I think, I have to think, that he wants to understand what he did. And he probably doesn’t at all. I’m simply projecting on to him my desire to understand what he did. In some way . . . it sounds absurd, but I don’t think he’s all that interested in what he did. As though it’s not quite real to him. You know what I mean? Is there a name for that?’

  ‘Plenty,’ says Liz, the expert. ‘But they don’t explain much.’

  ‘No,’ says Alix. ‘It’s circular, really. Naming and observing, observing and naming. One can never tell what it’s really like, inside his head. Any more than one can tell what it’s like inside the head of those guys who bumped off poor Dirk Davis.’

  ‘Or inside the head of Charles Headleand, come to that,’ says Liz.

  ‘I wonder,’ says Alix, speculatively, ‘if we know what it is like in one another’s head? You and me? After knowing one another—how long is it—for thirty years and more?’

  ‘We could only know if we found out that we didn’t know,’ says Liz. ‘If one or the other of us did something really surprising. Really out of character, or that would seem to be out of character to the other pe
rson.’

  ‘Like that defector Esther, you mean? Whom we both thought we knew so well, until she suddenly vanished?’

  ‘I sometimes wonder about the children. I mean, I’d say it was impossible that Jonathan or Aaron or Alan could turn out to be a murderer. Or Sally or Stella either, not to be sexist about it. But then, one wouldn’t know, would one? Because it wouldn’t be obvious. So it would come as a shock. If one found such a thing out.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I imagine if anyone had been in close touch with P. Whitmore, they might have known. It was because nobody was in touch with him that nobody found him out.’

  ‘Well,’ says Liz, ‘I think I do know you quite well. I know that you aren’t a murderer, and I can predict, for instance’—she pauses, watching, as Alix turns over the leaves in the salad bowl—‘I can predict that you are about to reject the bits of fennel in favour of the lettuce and watercress.’

  ‘I’ve always hated fennel,’ says Alix, pleasantly. ‘In fact, I don’t like anything with that aniseed flavour, really, it’s about the only flavour I don’t much like. I can’t understand how people can drink Pernod.’

  ‘People are mysterious,’ says Liz, somewhat guiltily pondering the reason why she has put fennel in the salad at all, when she knew quite well Alix wouldn’t touch it. To test her? To annoy her? To attempt to dominate?

  ‘Tell me again,’ she says, ‘what P. Whitmore said about the tinned peas.’

  The next morning Alix got up early and caught a bus down to Baker Street and Madame Tussaud’s. She did not mention this outing to Liz, who was already seeing a patient when she left. She felt slightly furtive about it anyway, slightly ridiculous, at her age, queuing with an ill-assorted crew of down-market foreign tourists and oddly ill-complexioned provincials. Did she look as out of place as she felt, she wondered, would she be arrested for wrongful curiosity? And she was indeed stopped, at the top of the stairs, by a young woman with a market survey, wanting to know, amongst other things, if and when Alix had last been to visit the waxworks.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Alix, ‘About forty years ago, I suppose. With my mother.’

  And she wandered on into the dark exhibition, recalling her mother’s reluctance to indulge Alix and her sister in this outing, remembering their pleadings and cajolings and whinings, their eventual success. They hadn’t been able to understand why their mother, who had seemed keen to let them visit the British Museum and the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens and the Zoo, should have tried to draw the line at something they considered equally educational. Nearly everyone at school had been to Madame Tussaud’s, they said, why couldn’t they?

  Gazing, now, at the exhibits, Alix could see all too clearly why their mother had thought it unsuitable. Gloomy, morbid, grisly. Horrible history. Guy Fawkes, Mary Queen of Scots about to have her head cut off, Henry VIII with a tableau of his ill-fated wives, the infant cavalier of Yeames’s ‘When Did You Last See Your Father?’ Right-wing History. Martyrs’ Memorials. Alix moved on, through modern times, where she recognized Princess Di and Boris Becker and the Beatles, but was at a loss to identify many other personalities from the ephemeral world of entertainment; she was amused to see Ken Livingstone, and wondered whether Perry Blinkhorn would ever make it into wax.

  She had come, of course, to see the Chamber of Horrors, but could hardly make herself descend the fake-dungeon stairs. She had been frightened by it as a child, just as her mother had said she would be. Her mother, having given in, had washed her hands of them: ‘Well, if you must look, you must look,’ she had said, and Alix and her sister had gazed uncomfortably at treadmills and tortures. It seemed now, forty years on, perhaps slightly less gruesome—but oh dear yes, there were the authentic casts of the severed heads of Louis and Marie Antoinette, there was Marat in his bath. Well, one could hardly call Paul Whitmore all that peculiar in his interests, could one? Yesterday in the British Museum a cluster of perfectly respectable people had gathered to stare at Lindow Man, and here an only marginally less respectable lot were goggling at Marat and a replica of Garry Gillmore in the electric chair. A natural curiosity?

  Paul also had been here when he was ten, or so he had told Alix.

  Alix walked through quite briskly, but not so briskly that she did not, in the last section, come to a standstill face to face with an effigy of her friend P. Whitmore. There he was, the Horror of Harrow Road. It seemed rude to stare at him, but she did. He shone with a waxy pallor, and looked slightly smaller than he did in real life, though she supposed he couldn’t be. They must get the measurements right, surely? He didn’t look quite—well, real? He was dressed in a grey suit, and stood to attention, alert, helpful, like a shop assistant. Oh dear, thought Alix. She did not know whether to laugh or cry. Poor dummy. There he stood.

  She looks at him, he does not look at her. She is reminded of the day when she went to watch his trial. Then, as now, she had felt furtive, guilty, ashamed. She had not been called as a witness, although this had at one stage seemed a possibility, and she had avoided the early days of the hearing. But at the end of the second week she had found herself drawn there, to the Old Bailey, by an attraction more powerful than her natural distaste. In vain did she say to herself, as she stood in the queue waiting to enter the public gallery, that this was her civic right, that she had a right if not a duty to enter a court of justice to see justice being done: in vain did she say to herself that her interest, unlike that of those around her, was prompted by something more legitimate than mere idle sightseeing or muckraking, moneymaking curiosity. She had continued to feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, conspicuous, as she sat on the back row of the gallery, as unobtrusively as possible, her eyes modestly lowered for much of the proceedings, occupying as little space as possible, clutching her bag and her shopping basket.

  She had chosen, unwittingly, a dull day, not a day of lurid revelations. There had been interminable cross-questioning of a witness who had had a drink in a pub by the canal on the night that one of the victims had been murdered, and who had spoken to Paul at approximately 10.25—or was it more like 10.35?—for some minutes about a newly released horror movie. There was a long slow rigmarole about fingerprints and a carnival float on a waste lot. Time was spent clearing the court while matters of law were discussed. Time was spent refilling the court to proceed. Alix had watched the judge in his wig and half-moon glasses, making notes, twiddling his thumbs, occasionally almost yawning: she had watched the bewigged counsel, one of them high-coloured, large-nosed, scrubbed, choleric, the other pale as soap. She had watched the faces of the jury, the twelve random citizens, and had tried to read their faces: a handsome neatly suited Turkish lad, a white youth with cropped hair and a scar blaring across one cheek, a perky girl with tufty black Gothic hair and a red necklace, a woman with a soft weary managerial face, a raw-boned man with an open shirt and a gold medallion at his throat, a cashmere-cardiganed Sloane Ranger with smooth blonde hair . . . And she had watched, covertly, Paul. There he had sat, in the dock, impassively, this monster, unmoving, unmoved, expressionless, listening to the catalogue of his crimes, the slowly unfolding drama of his massacres.

  And it had been high drama, however slow the pace, however silent the protagonist. His very silence spoke. Alix, then as now, found herself wanting to ask the unaskable. ‘But why? Why? How did it happen to you? Why and how?’ The court was not interested in ‘why’ and its interest in ‘how’ ended where Alix’s began, but nevertheless the raw material was there. She had been transfixed. She had wanted to return the next day, and the next, like an addict, but luckily work prevented her. But she had felt, from that one long day, a bond, a connection, a continuation of that curious relation begun so obliquely on the night that the police had surrounded the house where Paul Whitmore and Esther Breuer lived. She had felt an obligation.

  The wax figure of the Horror stared at Alix from his subterranean chamber in the Hall of Fame. Yes, her mother had been right to consider such sights unsuitable for s
choolgirls. But society condoned rather than condemned her curiosity; her mother was revealed as a woman of unnaturally high principle. Mrs Thatcher had posed upstairs for her image here, and so had Bob Geldof, and Kenneth Kaunda and Marie Antoinette (twice, in her case, alive and dead). They’d all condoned it. Alix wandered on, up, towards the daylight. The Hall of Fame, the Chamber of Horrors. Snigger, snigger, have your photo taken with the famous, with J. R. or Red Ken or Marilyn. Oranges and Lemons, say the Bells of St Clement’s. Here comes a chopper to chop off your head. Oh God, the gruesome panic of those party games, the little clutching fingers, the human trap . . . and here, at last, was Baker Street, sanity, traffic, human faces, newspapers, pigeons, double-decker buses in a splendid convoy, tourists, touts, ice-cream vans, gift shops, bureaux de change, roasting chestnuts—for a moment, Alix wildly loved the 1980s.

  Paul Whitmore is carefully copying in fine pencil the famous outlines of the bronze horse mask found at Stanwick. Probably a chariot ornament, the text tells him. The sad blind horse face stares in curved Celtic lines. Paul is a poor draughtsman, he is dissatisfied with his handiwork, he rubs it out and begins again. Bronze, dull bronze, buried, now bright again. The last stand of Venutius. The triumph of the Romans. It has square pierced ears, the bronze mask, holes by which it had once been attached to long-rotted wood. In his mother’s salon, Mrs Murphy had pierced the ears of the young women of Toxetter.

  He rubs out, begins again, discards. The enigmatic horse stares. Heads had hung in rows from hooks. Pigs’ heads. Not horses’ heads. The British do not eat horse. They do not even feed horse to their dogs and cats. Horse is totem, taboo, sacred. But there had been jokes about horsemeat, unkind jokes in the little town. Horsemeat. Whoresmeat. Somebody had made such a pun. He hadn’t known what it had meant, had make the mistake of asking his father, over tea. Had been clipped over the ear, shut out of the house, while they screamed and ranted at one another. Near the end, that had been.