A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  He turns the pages of Alix’s book. There is a bronze mask boss from the River Thames at Wandsworth. Alix Bowen had lived in Wandsworth, she tells him. Sometimes she describes her life there. She describes the house that is now let to a visiting professor from Australia. She describes the neighbourhood, the shops, compares notes with North Kensington, where Paul Whitmore and Esther Breuer had lived.

  Paul Whitmore does not know the region where he is now imprisoned: he knows it only through books. He knows London, where he earned the sobriquet of ‘The Horror of Harrow Road’, and he knows the small town in the north Midlands, of the hairdressing salon and the butcher’s shop, where he was known as Piggy Paul the Porker (although he is not and never has been fat). He has drifted in other places (a few months in Manchester, a year in Stoke-on-Trent), but he has become a Londoner, a drifting Londoner, a lost Londoner. Now he is nowhere, in limbo, in a coffin. He does not know Northam. He has never been there. It is to him a fictitious city, a city of the mind. Alix describes it to him sometimes. He cannot visualize it well. He knows nobody else who lives in it. Alix is his sole personal source of information about Northam and Leeds.

  He turns the pages of the book, to the paragraphs on Celtic ritual and the impact of the Romans on the Old Religion. A wooden rubbed armless old god from Ralaghan, County Cavan, stares at him expressively, reproachfully, balefully. He reads: ‘A grove there was, untouched by men’s hands from ancient times, whose interlacing boughs enclosed a space of darkness and cold shade, and banished the sunlight from above . . . gods were worshipped there with savage rites, the altars were heaped with hideous offerings and every tree was sprinkled with human gore . . . The images of the gods, grim and rude, were uncouth blocks, formed of felled tree trunks . . . The people never resorted thither to worship at close quarters but left the place to the gods.’ A quotation from Lucan, the poet. Not Lucan, the murderer.

  Paul Whitmore has made of himself a hideous offering. Here he is, offered up. But no one can see him. He is absent, obscure. No light reaches him. No one looks at him, save his fellow-prisoners, the prison officers and the blue eyes of Alix Bowen. Is this what he had wanted? He does not know. He knows there had been a need for sacrifice, for appeasement. The gods had wanted a sacrifice. But of what nature? Had it been accepted? One does not worship at close quarters. It is not safe to go too near the sacred grove.

  As he sits there, chewing the end of a pencil, the people of Britain are still in the process of making him up, of inventing him. He had offered himself up to their imagination, as he had offered up his victims. What will they make of him, of them? Will they fail him, themselves? Sometimes he thinks that Alix Bowen will be able to invent him, that her story will make sense, that it will persuade the newspapers and the courts and the people. Sometimes he thinks she is incapable of doing anything of the sort.

  Paul Whitmore would like to ask Alix Bowen to try to contact his mother. He has not heard from his mother since she ran away, fifteen years ago. He knows that in similar cases parents have been retraced, interrogated, their memoirs have been purchased for vast sums by the tabloids.

  So far, he has not dared to suggest this course of action to Alix. He does not quite know how to bring the subject up. It is a little delicate. He is hoping that she might think of the idea for herself. On her next visit, perhaps, he will drop another hint. By months, her visits are measured. He will wait for the next moon.

  It is early March, and daffodils bloom in London window boxes. A faint false spring deceives the buds, and trees turn bronze, pink, lime green. Liz Headleand is lunching with her old friend and enemy Ivan Warner, as she does once or twice a year. They gossip. On Ivan’s part, at least, seriously, professionally. Ivan is a gossip columnist. He likes to pick Liz’s brains. He is always hoping that Liz will present him with a psychiatric scoop. As one of her specialities has been the problems associated with the reuniting of adopted children with their true parents, maybe she will one day find for him an abandoned princeling, a reclaimed cabinet minister, a film star’s rejected babe, a tycoon’s incestuous marriage with his own daughter? The plot possibilities in Liz’s line of business are endless, he reminds her, as he plies her with Pinot Chardonnay and admires the little pastry fish swimming in the saffron sauce of her ivory sole.

  ‘No,’ says Liz, ‘nothing. Nothing exciting at all. Sorry.’

  She smiles at him, amiably. It is only a game. He knows she will not tell. Her heart softens to Ivan, over the years. She used to think him a dangerous little man, but time has mellowed him or strengthened her, she is not sure which, and she no longer half fears him. She indulges him. And he her.

  ‘I had heard,’ said Ivan, in that inimitably suggestive way of his, ‘that we were to be honoured with the sight of you on television? Can this be true, I asked myself? I had thought you didn’t approve of the television.’

  ‘Who told you?’ asked Liz, disconcerted despite herself.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ said Ivan.

  ‘Well,’ said Liz. ‘I did agree to be on this panel thing. That’s all.’

  ‘I wonder why?’ insinuates Ivan.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ says Liz. ‘I mean, why not?’ But she also wonders why. She admires, yet again, his sense of her weak spots, her Achilles’ heel.

  ‘It’s just not your style, that’s all,’ says Ivan.

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ says Liz. ‘But they were very pressing. And I thought it was time somebody talked some sense.’

  ‘So we shall have the pleasure of seeing you talking sense?’

  ‘I hope so,’ says Liz, briskly, staring hard at his inquiring small black well-hidden eyes.

  ‘Well,’ says Ivan, ‘you’re a brave woman.’

  ‘But of course,’ says Liz.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew Christopher?’ says Ivan, gently probing, cutting in half a green bean with the edge of his flat fork.

  Liz’s mind races. Christopher? Does she know a Christopher? Ah, yes, she has got it. Christopher What’s-his-name, newly appointed Director of Programmes for PPS. What is his name? A false trail. An utterly false trail. So that’s why Ivan was interested in her TV appearance.

  ‘Oh, Christopher,’ she says. ‘Of course I know Christopher. I’ve know him for years!

  Ivan can tell he has drawn a blank. He loses interest in the pursuit, switches track, starts again.

  ‘And your ex?’ he inquires. ‘How’s old Charles?’

  ‘Oh, Charles!’ says Liz. ‘He’s mad, poor darling.’

  ‘I heard he broke his nose?’

  ‘Mugged,’ says Liz. ‘Nothing personal. Just mugged.’

  ‘And how’s his business?’

  Liz shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t understand such stuff. He seems to have switched his interests to some kind of Euronews project. It’s all to do with satellites. I’m sure you know more about it than I do.’

  Liz has no intention of mentioning the Baldai fantasy to Ivan: it would not even amuse him, it is too bizarre, too foreign. She allows him to rattle on for a while about Charles’s ex-wife Lady Henrietta, one of whose children has been involved in a drugs scandal. A small, dull drugs scandal. Liz cannot take much interest in it, can feel only a very limited degree of Schadenfreude, as she can think with only a limited degree of complacency of her own family. They may not go in for quite such vacuous pursuits as the upper classes, but they cause her anxiety, nevertheless, in their separate ways, and there seems little point in triumphing over Lady Henrietta’s bad management. She refuses to be drawn into bitching about Henrietta.

  Ivan moves from Lady Henrietta to Robert Oxenholme, Minister of Sponsorship for the Arts, by a transition that seems more natural to him than it does to Liz, for Liz has forgotten that these two characters are vaguely related, that their names are part of the meaningless genealogical reticulation of Hestercombes, Ox-enholmes and Stocklinches. Liz is more interested in Robert, for he is a friend of her friend Esther, and it is this connection that Ivan wishes to p
robe.

  ‘Well,’ says Liz, ‘the last I heard, they were writing a book together. On some minor Bolognese or Ferraran figure. But I don’t suppose they’ll ever finish it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Esther never finishes anything. And Robert’s too busy.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Esther finish anything?’

  Liz considers. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’ve often wondered. She lacks ambition. Not confidence, but ambition. I don’t think she sees the point. Of trying to make a lasting mark.’

  ‘It seems odd, perhaps. When her profession is to study the lasting marks of others?’

  Liz smiles.

  ‘And you, Liz, how lasting will your mark be? Do you ever wonder?’

  Liz stares at Ivan, who squats before her, neckless, toadlike, but, like a toad, somehow enchanting.

  ‘In my job,’ she says, ‘one doesn’t expect to make a lasting mark. One’s patients recover, recirculate, suffer less. That is all.’

  ‘And yet,’ says Ivan, ‘some would say your profession is full of megalomaniacs who long to live for ever, and who impose their views on others with an autocratic zeal, and who are quite happy to kill off all dissent in order that their own names should shine more brightly in the halls of fame?’

  ‘You’re only speaking of a small percentage. Of the stars. I grant that many of them are megalomaniacs. But there are a lot of quiet toilers in the vineyard. Like myself.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you as a quiet toiler.’

  ‘That’s because you never see me at work, you only ever see me at play. Eating a nice lunch, like this. Wasting time in the company of timewasters like yourself.’

  ‘I think of you as a more—forceful figure. A bit more of a star than you suggest! Surely?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. But to be a star, one has to . . . ’ She hesitates. She is not sure if she wants this conversation, is not quite sure how Ivan led her into it.

  ‘Yes?’ he prompts.

  ‘To publish. To have one’s own theory. To defend one’s own theory. To be—in a word—original.’

  ‘And you think you are not?’

  ‘I know I am not. I am a pluralist. I take from here and there, I use other people’s bits and pieces. I use what seems useful. This seems to me pragmatic. It’s a good way to care for patients, but it’s not a good way to make oneself famous.’

  ‘But you have published, I thought?’

  ‘Only papers. Articles. Like Esther, I’ve never got round to writing a whole book.’

  ‘But you could, now, presumably? Now you have time, and the family are all grown?’

  ‘Ivan, what is this? Why are you being so peculiarly mephistophelean? My life is perfectly busy, thank you, without any further ambitions. Why can’t I just carry on as I am?’

  ‘Why not indeed?’

  A little plate of dark red salad arrives at Liz’s left hand. She rearranges it with her fork, and chews a bitter leaf.

  ‘Fame is the spur,’ she says, after a while, ‘that the clear spirit doth raise, the last infirmity of noble minds . . . A very honest statement that, on Milton’s part, I’ve always thought. But for some reason Esther and I don’t seem to suffer from it. No doubt because we are nice, modest, unassuming women. We don’t need to see our names in print every week. As you do.’

  ‘Well, yes, I do, I admit it,’ says Ivan. ‘It’s like a disease with me.’

  ‘An infirmity.’

  ‘Yes. An infirmity.’

  ‘Actually,’ says Liz, ‘what I do suffer from is curiosity. I want to know what really happened.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At the beginning. When human nature began. At the beginning of human time. And I know I’ll never know. But I can’t stop looking. It’s very frustrating. When occasionally it comes over me that I’ll never know, I can’t quite believe it. Surely, one day, I will find out?’

  ‘We don’t even know what happened in our own lives. Let alone the life of the species.’

  ‘No. I know that’s true. But I can’t help waiting for the revelation.’

  ‘When you’ve had it, will you publish it?’

  Liz laughs. ‘No, no, it will be the end of the world, there will be no more publishing and delivering of lectures,’ she says.

  ‘You are in an apocalyptic vein, suddenly.’

  ‘It is your fault, Ivan. You encourage me.’

  ‘So apocalyptic are you that you are failing to see what is sitting in front of your own nose. You say you suffer from insatiable curiosity, but you let me ask all the questions. Ask me a question, Liz.’

  Liz looks at him, sharply. Is he teasing her? Is it a trick?

  ‘What question shall I ask you, Ivan?’

  ‘No, no, you are the clever one, you are the diviner. You must guess.’

  ‘Not the answer, but the question?’

  ‘That’s correct. You must guess the question.’

  Liz, comically exercised by guilt and conscience (for it is true that she never asks Ivan about himself, always lets him make the running), peers at him, as though hoping to read his face, his mind. He smiles back, shrugs his shoulders, crinkles his eyes at her, taps his chin with his thumb, and raises his glass.

  ‘Well,’ says Liz, you’re looking very pleased with yourself. So I guess something good has happened to you. Have you got a new job? No? Have you been promoted? No? Ah, I know what it must be—are you in love?’

  Ivan nods, encouragingly.

  ‘Yes? But there’s more to it than that? Are you getting married?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ivan. He is beaming satisfaction at her, and of course, now she sees that this must be why he has been so amiable, so benevolent, so well disposed, he has been hugging this secret all the way through lunch, waiting to astonish her with it. And she is astonished.

  ‘Good Lord, Ivan, how amazing! I thought you never would, I thought you were the only real bachelor left in London! Congratulations! Am I allowed to ask the name of the other party, or do I have to wait for the official announcement?’

  ‘If you read the serious information in gossip columns, as everybody else does, you’d know it already. So I might as well tell you. I’m going to marry Alicia Barnard.’

  ‘Good heavens. Are you really? Good Lord!’

  Liz is silenced by this coup, silenced and delighted. No wonder Ivan is looking so smug. Alicia Barnard is not only a beauty, she is also a distinguished classical guitarist of impeccable provenance and reputation—how can it be that Ivan has persuaded her to marry him?

  ‘Congratulations,’ repeats Liz, rallying. ‘That is romantic. What a happy story! What wonderful news!’

  ‘The story,’ says Ivan, twiddling with the stem of his wineglass, and quite unable to stop smiling, ‘is called Beauty and the Beast.’

  ‘Oh Ivan, I hope you’ll both be very very happy. Tell me about her. Tell me what she’s like. Tell me how it happened.’

  And Ivan tells, and Liz listens, making up for lost time and shameful indifference and incuriosity, learning what all London knows already, that Ivan and the red-haired Alicia have been courting for eighteen months, that they have been spotted at concerts and cited at functions and photographed at receptions and caught dining in small smart restaurants, that they have been on holiday together in Tuscany and shopping together in Harrods and have bought a small house together in Berkshire. Ivan relates all this with a helpless innocence, with a naive delight that brings tears to the eyes of Liz. Love has transformed him. The arbitrary, accidental goddess has smiled on Ivan, and he has become another person, a nicer person. In his fifties, he has become a new man. They call for a cognac with their coffee, to celebrate.

  ‘I was a stage-door Johnny, I admit it,’ says Ivan, blotched and glowing with pride. ‘I just hung around. I waited. I drove her around. I made myself useful. And she let me. She liked it. She got to like it. And then one thing led to another. And here I am, an almost married man. Do you think I’ll be able to manage it? I’ve nev
er really lived with anyone before. Or not for long. And neither has she. Amazing, isn’t it? She’s very shy, you know. She’s a very nice person.’

  ‘I’m sure she is,’ says Liz, faintly. It is almost too much for her, this late flood of hope and innocence. She wishes Ivan and his Alicia well, yes, of course she does, but how can she, at her age, have any faith in their vision of married bliss in a small house in Berkshire? Unless they are freaks, who have escaped the human condition altogether, one can be certain that grief, boredom, infidelity or disillusion await Mr and Mrs Ivan Warner, will creep up upon them more familiarly, more insidiously, than love itself did . . . Liz shakes her head, drains her glass, looks bright again. Maybe Ivan has been so horrible in the first fifty years of his life that he has already paid his debts to human nature, and can now be free, like the frog prince, to sit by his fireside and listen to music and gaze across his lawn?

  ‘Goodbye, Ivan,’ says Liz, on the dirty Soho street, where old newspapers, cardboard boxes, cauliflower stalks, empty bottles and plastic bags of prawn shells heap and rustle and sigh and stink in the March breeze. ‘Goodbye, Ivan, good luck!’

  The last, perhaps, of her little lunches with Ivan, she thinks, as a taxi bears her back to St John’s Wood and work. Or the last until he and Alicia quarrel, and he needs a shoulder . . . but enough, enough of these gloomy thoughts, she tells herself, as she tries to compose her mind to receive her next patient, who is suffering from severe depression which he thinks was caused by the sudden death of his wife. As perhaps it was, perhaps it was: but whatever caused it, it is with him now, sitting on him heavily, as he puts it, like a heavy beast. Can Liz charm it, can she turn it into a little frog, can she make it hop lightly away? He hopes so, she hopes so. They work together to seduce the heavy beast. The wife stays dead, she will not come back to life and sew and dance and sing. She is ash in a north London garden, where a few crocuses outlive her and her planting of them.

  Janice Enderby is preparing food for another dinner party. She has rashly invited Alison Peacock, the director of Northam’s Theatre-in-the-Round, and Tony Troughton, local radio reporter and his wife, and a couple of staff from the school where her husband Edward teaches. She asked them without properly consulting Edward, and he was not wholly pleased to be told. He knows she will get in a state about it, and take it out on him later. He knows that something will go wrong. It always does. It goes wrong because she tries too hard. In vain does he urge her not to make such efforts, in vain does he try to persuade her that everyone is quite happy just with a plateful of spaghetti or shepherd’s pie. Janice has pretensions, and they make her and everybody else very uncomfortable.