A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  At the moment she is making chicken liver pâté, with butter, sherry, juniper berries and minced bay leaf. Round it goes, in the liquidizer, reducing itself to a warm smooth pale-brown paste. She takes the lid off the machine, sniffs the contents. The smell, warm, is nauseating, although she knows it will taste all right cold. The texture too is nauseating. She splatters it out into a bowl, flattens it. It steams, odiously. It looks like a mound of shit. Janice shudders with distaste.

  She runs the hot water over the complicated interior structure of the blender, directing the rubber swizzle tap into its innards. The tap pulses, hotly, in her fingers. It pulses and throbs like a live thing.

  Janice feels quite faint with disgust. She decides to make herself a cup of instant coffee, opens a new jar, has to break the paper ring that seals the contents. She tears it, clumsily, with her finger, she violates it. The smell of coffee granules rises at her, rank like a tomcat.

  She slices a red cabbage. Its red and white veins open, its crisp pretty involuted guts stare back at her. Her fingers are stained red, and so is the butcher’s block. She has killed the cabbage.

  Prunes, then, she stones, to add to her braised cabbage and her dish of quail. The prunes are like small turds, small sticky turds. She had been given prunes, as a child, when suffering from constipation. Prunes and syrup of figs. But how had her mother known she was suffering from constipation? She had never complained of it. Her mother did not watch her, day and night. Nevertheless, once a week or so, ‘Oh, Janice is out of sorts, she is a grumpy little girl today. Prunes and syrup of figs for Janice tonight!’ It had seemed a violation then, and seems one now, as Janice, unforgivingly, looks back.

  The body is a trap, a trick, a betrayer. One should keep one’s own body secret, private, concealed. Not let them poke about in one’s entrails. Not let them have power.

  Edward had seemed a bodiless person, a disembodied person. But it had not been so.

  Janice knows she is neurotic, hysteric, on the verge of some classifiable disorder. She wonders what it is. She has a lump in her breast, but has no intention of telling anyone about it. Sometimes she finds herself almost hoping that it may be fatal. If she were to die, she wouldn’t have to go on worrying, would she, about what else it is that is wrong?

  She slices an onion, and weeps. She layers the earthenware pot with cabbage, prunes, apples, cranberry jelly, onion, she sticks in cloves and pours over it raspberry vinegar, which has reached the north of England, as fish sauce reached the outposts of the Roman Empire. She puts it in a slow oven, and gets the quails from the freezer.

  Little birds, frozen in a row. Some people are squeamish about little birds. Janice, who is squeamish about a cabbage, does not feel too strongly about little birds. They do not much resemble any part of the human body.

  Rabbits are another matter. The quail farm, where Janice buys the quails, sells frozen rabbits. But they remind her of dead, skinned, red, sad babies. No, she could not cook a rabbit.

  One could be a vegetarian, of course. Like Alix Bowen’s murderer. Janice had thought of asking the Bowens to dinner, but had hesitated—she does not really know them, she has met them only once, at the Northern Schools Drama Festival, she had no excuse for inviting them. But she had had a conversation with Alix, as they sat next to one another on hard institutional seats, waiting for the curtain to rise on High Cross Comprehensive’s winning production of Doctor Faustus. A proper conversation. Alix had asked Janice what she did, and Janice had said that she had once been an actress (which was more or less true) and that now she worked part-time at the Regional Arts Office (which was not very true), and that her husband Edward (that ‘skinny chap over there waving his arms about’) was Head of English and Drama at High Cross, and the director of this ambitious production that they were about to behold. Alix in turn had divulged that she had herself been an English teacher and had taught female offenders in a psychiatric prison in London, and that she recognized Edward’s name because she had heard he was trying to set up a Drama Group at Porston Prison, where Alix visited. ‘Ah,’ said Janice, ‘you’re the person who goes to see that murderer.’ Alix admitted that she was, and answered a few stock questions about P. Whitmore. She then pointed out Brian, who was also up front, talking to a group of civic dignitaries and the Mayor, and claimed him as her husband and the Head of Educational Projects of Northam Council. ‘Your husband ought to meet my husband,’ said Alix. ‘I’m sure he’d be interested in the prison drama group.’

  But it hadn’t got any further than that, because the curtain had gone up, and pleasantries had to be abandoned. Janice, who had seen the production before, was of course worried about all the things that might go wrong—Edward had been complaining that the stage was too shallow for the set, and that the lighting man was a fool and wouldn’t let Edward’s own lighting trainee protégé explain the schedule to him properly—and she was also apprehensive that Alix would be bored out of her mind. But Alix had settled into a dutiful attention, which seemed to intensify into real interest. And it was a good production, even though it was Edward’s: the modern-dress balletic chorus moved beautifully, the Helen of Troy apparition got a round of applause, and the Faustus and the Mephistopheles were excellent. Edward had chosen it for them, and they had done him proud. Two sixth formers, friends, rivals, passionate amateur actors, desperate to get into RADA or LAMDA or the Central, both immensely talented, in Edward’s view—sophisticated, delicate, perfect timing. The boy who played Faustus was an Indian, a doctor’s son, tall, lank, elegant, melancholy with a strange deep husky catch to his voice: the Mephistopheles was big, broad, physically assertive, red haired, potato featured, compelling. ‘I’ve cast them against the grain,’ Edward had explained to Janice, a hundred times, until she had said all right, I’ve got that, let’s talk about something else, shall we?—but it had worked, and they worked together, with a sinister intimacy, a suggestion of erotic collusion. Brilliant, thought, as Marlowe’s mighty lines rolled on.

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Alix, turning to Janice at the end, her hands hot with clapping, her cheeks pink with excitement. ‘Quite, quite brilliant! What talented boys—and what a wonderful production. Your husband must be very proud!’

  The audience had clapped on, and the young men had smiled and bowed. Beautiful, they both were, in their different styles. Eighteen years old. The world before them. Utterly confident, utterly assured. They bowed, on a civic stage in Sheffield, as though they were already stars. The theatre tempted them, they would sell their souls to it. The hot bright lights shone on them.

  And so they had shone, once, on Edward Enderby. He too had been stagestruck, he too had dreamed of applause, of the footlights, of green rooms and dressing-rooms and good luck telegrams and dazzling notices in the press. He had been ruined by delusions of glory. He had refused to go into the family firm, as his younger brother Clive was to do: he had insisted on going to drama school, had thrown himself into wild hopes, had worked and worked—and to what avail? He had had a few jobs, here and there, odd jobs. And was now a teacher of drama. Still stagestruck, still besotted, still convinced that he could dazzle the nation, given the chance.

  Yes, that was the odd thing about Edward, reflected Janice, as she cracked eggs for the lemon mousse. He really hadn’t accepted that he wasn’t a star. Inside himself, he really thought he was. He thought he was better than Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole and Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi and Tom Conti and all those other talentless actors who had so mysteriously made it to the top. Edward really thought he could do it better given a chance.

  And once, he had been good. Oh yes. She had seen him shine. At drama college, where she first met him, when he could have been little older than those two boys, Shokat and Stuart. She had seen him give his Prospero and it had been—yes, magical. Magical. Against all the odds. A twenty-year-old playing an old man. A twenty-year-old with the remnants of a Yorkshire accent playing the Duke of Milan. Not a part much coveted by the young, a dull part, a pr
osy, unshowy, sexless part. But Edward had inhabited it, had made it his own. He had been dark, frightening, powerful: Miranda and Ferdinand, Ariel and Caliban, Alonso and Sebastian had been shadows, puppets. His puppets. He had shone, he had stolen the play’s thunder. The college had admired, theatrical agents had admired and solicited, his contemporaries had applauded wildly—and Edward had been ruined.

  He still believed he had that power. That he could step out of banishment, out of retirement, wave his wand and hold the stage.

  She hopes those two boys make it.

  She stares at the bowl of egg white. It is globby like mucus. A thin trail of unborn chicken lies in it, like a trace of nosebleed and snot.

  Janice is menstruating. It is the third day. She has had an IUD fitted and her periods now are heavy, bloody, dark, rusty. She has to wear pads as well as tampons. She is afraid that she will mark her clothes. She is afraid that she may smell.

  She starts to whip the egg whites, and they begin to transform themselves into something less revolting.

  She wishes she had invited Alix Bowen. Alix Bowen’s murderer is a vegetarian. The red cabbage had split like a skull.

  Janice shudders. Thinking about these things has made her feel quite ill. She knows she cannot afford to feel too ill. She has to carry on, for Edward’s sake, for the sake of the children.

  She whips the egg whites until they froth and stiffen and peak. Some evil is oozing from her into them, through the metal beaters, through the plastic handle. Dangerously, furiously, she whips. The kitchen is a dangerous place. It is full of horrible animations, appalling suggestions. It is not a charnel house, no, no, Paul Whitmore is wrong there. It breeds, it incubates, it brings forth young.

  Clive Enderby sat alone in his sitting-room in Hansborough, watching Liz Headleand on television. It was not the kind of programme he usually watched, but he found himself compelled to stay tuned. She interested him, and not only through the chance geographical connection, through the natural curiosity aroused by the sight of a Northam girl made good. Clive’s connection with her was more intimate. He did not know her well, but he knew more about her than many people did, and indeed he knows more about her than she knows, or can know, herself. To him, by chance, had come the delicate task of revealing to her the circumstances of her father’s suicide, of telling her how he had hanged himself, years ago, when she was a little girl, before Clive was born. They were connected.

  Liz was taking part in a panel discussion on sex and the young. The other participants were a politician, a retired headmaster-turned-pundit, and a woman from some family-planning organization. One of the starting points of the discussion was the much publicized case of the suicide of a fifteen-year-old boy. The parents of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend had dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night and set the law on him. He had been accused of unlawful intercourse. He had thrown himself under a train. Everybody had piously deplored this outcome, but only Liz used the occasion to speak up for the abolition of the age of consent.

  There she sat, dressed in a cream and yellow flowing robe, a handsome middle-aged matron, knowingly uttering atrocities. With a calm smile, and a mildly but not enthusiastically animated manner, and a battery of statistics. Her performance disturbed the live studio audience, the other panel members, and Clive Enderby. He listened, at first idly, then intently, to her immodest proposals.

  Yes, she was in favour of abolishing the age of consent, she said. She couldn’t see the point of it. Sex had been progressively criminalized, she said, rattling off dates and acts and by-laws, invoking Home Office working parties, policy advisory committees, the National Council for One-Parent Families, the Criminal Law Revision Committee. What harm had that boy and his girlfriend been doing? They had been obeying nature’s law, not man’s. In other times, in other societies, they would have been committing no offence. The offence is man-made, said Liz Headleand, let us unmake it. That boy was hounded to his death by our inability to think clearly, said Liz Headleand, smiling like an oracle, like a sibyl, in her faintly Grecian garb.

  Brave words, unfashionable, unwise words, in these days of AIDS-induced terror, in these days of mounting paranoia about child sex abuse and child sex abuse detection.

  What you are recommending is a pederast’s charter, the keenfaced hornrim-spectacled young politician had protested, to loud applause. He appealed to parental rights and the sanctity of family life. Unmoved, Liz had said that she didn’t think it was desirable to use the law to settle family disputes, and that the boy and girl in question were both underage and had been sleeping together by mutual consent for several months. Now one was dead and the other was no doubt damaged for life. I don’t see what this case has to to do with pederasty, she said. Or with paedophilia. It’s more a Romeo and Juliet case, if you ask me.

  ‘But you can’t deny,’ said the politician, ‘that the removal of legal constraint would open the floodgates?’

  Liz appeared amused, quizzical, interested.

  ‘You mean you think everyone is longing to have sex with the underaged, and that only the law prevents it?’ she asked.

  The politician did not answer, but proceeded to cite instances of abused children, of sex offences against children, of prostituted children, of slaughtered children.

  ‘But I don’t think you’re being very logical,’ said Liz. ‘I’m not recommending that we decriminalize murder, or assault, or kidnapping, you know.’

  Her air of patient detachment goaded and irritated the politician and the audience. The discussions rambled on from cliché to outrage to cliché. An elderly gentleman in the audience mentioned the decline of the Roman Empire. A woman in a lively pink blouse, with a curiously salacious manner, blamed sex education in schools for an increase in teenage pregnancies. Television talk, the pub talk of the public. Liz appeared to be genuinely interested by the oddity of some of the views expressed, and returned, perhaps unfortunately, to one of her original queries: ‘Do you really think,’ she inquired, innocently, this time of the retired headmaster, ‘that the desire of adults for sexual contact with children is so widespread and so strong that only the most severe social and legal sanctions can control it?’ While he hesitated, she pursued: ‘And if this is so, does it ever occur to you that this desire itself could be less abnormal than you believe it to be? And possibly less harmful?’

  Now, Clive could tell, she really had gone too far, she had broken a taboo, she had said the unspeakable. The studio simmered and bubbled and spluttered. Nobody listened, as Liz expressed her sympathy with the headmaster, her appreciation of the onerous responsibility of his career, of his difficulties in controlling the staff, perpetually lusting illegally after the pupils, and the pupils, perpetually lusting illegally after one another. ‘It is a strange world you conjure up for us,’ said Liz, ‘a world which I find it hard to recognize from my own observations . . . ’

  But nobody was listening. Liz was a witch, an unnatural monster. Liz smiled on, as they rounded upon her, one after another.

  Clive Enderby, watching this curious performance, wondered: is she trying to commit professional suicide? Is that her aim? If she goes on like this she will be struck off. You can’t expect people to be rational about a topic like that.

  Even the chairman seemed to think things had got out of hand, and tried to make one or two efforts to bring Liz back into the fold of orthodoxy. ‘But surely you don’t mean . . . surely you’re not trying to suggest . . . ’ he proffered, helpfully. But Liz persisted. Yes, she did mean, yes, she did want to suggest. Moreover, she said, she assumed she had been invited to take part in this discussion in order to make these suggestions, however much antagonism they might arouse, so she was hardly likely to back down now. When asked if her views represented those of her profession as a whole, Liz, for the first time, hesitated and then continued: ‘No, I wouldn’t say so, these views are my own. Some share them, some do not. But may I say that I haven’t really been expressing views. The rest of you have been do
ing that. I have been asking questions and making suggestions. And your response to those questions has been most illuminating.’

  So, not professional suicide. But still, risky stuff. Unpopular, probably untenable. Clive, who knew next to nothing about psychoanalytic theory, was fascinated. As Liz vanished from the screen, he remembered her behaviour at the time of her mother’s death, when she and Shirley had been to visit him in Dilke Street. He remembered her mixture of curiosity and carelessness, of interest and indifference, as she confronted some of the squalid details of her own past. They were probably less squalid than she had feared, for she had greeted them almost with relief. ‘So that’s what it was all about,’ she had said, as though it was nothing—and yet how could it be nothing?

  It came to Clive Enderby that what he had been watching on television that night was not a cool, objective, detached contribution to a debate, but an act of elaborate professional and personal self-justification, a baroque attempt on Liz’s part to justify her own genesis, her own history. And some of the facts, Clive suspected, she had misinterpreted. She was building on false premises.

  Fascinating. I am out of my depth, thought Clive Enderby, and poured himself a whisky and soda, and switched over to the golf.