A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  Liz’s extended family had watched her television performance in a different spirit from Clive Enderby’s, and with varying degrees of irritation or approval. Her eldest stepson Jonathan and his wife Xanthe, sitting before their pleasant log fire in their cottage in Suffolk, had not been amused.

  ‘Christ,’ Jonathan had groaned, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘someone should tell her the permissive society’s dead and buried, you just can’t talk like that these days, it’s embarrassing, it’s ridiculous, it’s so bloody old-fashioned, whatever can she be thinking of?’

  ‘Mmm?’ said Xanthe, who was not listening either to Liz or to Jonathan.

  ‘Any minute now,’ said Jonathan, ‘she’ll start singing the praises of the swinging sixties and going on about the moral backlash, I mean, you just can’t say that kind of thing these days, or not on this kind of programme—whatever got into her, to start appearing on telly like this? She never used to, in the old days, she always said it was a waste of time and a professional misjudgement, and my God how right she was!’

  ‘I think she looks rather good,’ said Xanthe. ‘Is that a Zoe Bittersweet dress, do you think?’

  ‘And at her age,’ repeated Jonathan, taking a disconsolate swig of claret.

  ‘Or it could be from Hannah’s in Baker Street,’ mused Xanthe, trying to pretend not to hear her baby daughter’s voice raising itself above the television’s ceaseless commentary.

  Jonathan threw another log on the fire. ‘Please God, let her not start on infantile sexuality, not now,’ he implored, as the sparks flew upward.

  Stepson Aaron was more indulgent, as his non-aligned attitude to life permitted him to be. He sat back in his battered old armchair in his flat above a junk shop in Chalk Farm and smiled in appreciation as the expressions of her co-panellists grew more outraged, more self-righteous, more disbelieving. The crosser they got, he noted, the more serenely Liz smiled. ‘That’s the spirit, Liz,’ he said, aloud, approvingly, to his empty room. He would ring her, in the morning, to congratulate her upon her stand.

  Stepson Alan up in Manchester missed the programme altogether. He never knew it was on, and was never to know: oblique references to it continued to bewilder him for some weeks. Alan watched quite a lot of television, but being a true intellectual his favourite programmes were soccer, snooker, a cartoon about subversive mice and a sit-com about the rag trade. He hated chats and debates on the box. He did enough chatting and debating, with his students and his friends.

  Daughter Sally watched, loyally, with her friend Jo in their flat in Streatham. They were both slightly bored by it, but did not say so. They were eating a Chinese takeaway as they watched. Their minds were not on Liz and her arguments. Their minds were on other things. They were both well over the age of consent.

  Daughter Stella watched, and was perturbed. Like Jonathan, she had had enough of her parents making fools of themselves, but unlike Jonathan she had also had enough of England. Watching the extraordinary mixture of whining vote-beseeching, arse-licking vulgarity, demotic stupidity, intellectual pretension, moral confusion and entertainment-packaged pseudo-seriousness, she groaned within her twelve stones of self-dislike, disliking Liz and her live studio audience even more than she disliked herself. But in some way, deep down, she felt the stirrings of hope. The dislike was about to come to a head, to burst, and she would be purged, free again, light as air again, she would take off, for another continent, another world.

  Ex-husband Charles, watching alone in Kentish Town, was also perturbed—not so much by what Liz said, which was old hat to him, as by the fact that she was there on TV saying it at all. Her disrespect for his medium had been so consistent, so sustained. Why had it now crumbled? What weakness in her was showing itself in this belated consent? Did she need attention, notoriety? Surely not. She was diminished by her concession. The medium had been too powerful for her, it had sucked her up and into its great dusty bag full of rubbish. Charles loathed discussion programmes. He liked Hard News.

  Carla Davis watched Liz Headleand’s programme with a mixture of rage and satisfaction. Like Charles, Carla Davis is a news addict. She was addicted long before Dirk’s disappearance, although that had condoned and intensified her passion. As a bored homeworker (she worked as a freelance editor, usually on dullish reference books) she had often switched on the news in hope of a catastrophe to divert her from the tedium of her task. Sometimes she was rewarded by a plane crash or a Beirut bomb or a hijacking, but not often enough. As she listened to the same round of repeated or minimally updated reports of union negotiations, of President Reagan’s operations and ill health, of assessments of the prospects of the Tory Party at the next election, she had often had a wild desire for a completely different lot of news. Completely and utterly different. She sometimes fantasized about a day which would begin normally enough, with a dullish selection of items on the Today programme on Radio 4 at 7.30 a.m., items which would reappear in identical or slightly updated form throughout the morning until the noon news, but which would vanish utterly from The World at One. The nation would switch on The World at One, and find a completely NEW LOT of news! Ten new items. All wholly new. A New World, with New News, New Made. Change history. Begin again, at lunch time.

  This fantasy chimes in well with some of Charles’s ambitions. It is one of the foundations of their alliance.

  Carla Davis watched Liz Headleand in a cream dress commenting on a non-news story that will be forgotten in no time. A non-story. Who cares that a grubby little fifteen-year-old fucker from Formby had bumped himself off because his girlfriend’s parents had set the law on him? Who cares? It is a non-story. Liz digs her own grave to Carla’s delight, and makes a complete fool of herself. Carla thinks she herself has a much better television personality than Liz Headleand. Much more cleverly calculated. Why, Liz has aroused the antagonism of the viewers and the other participants. Carla knows this to be a mistake. On television, one should play for sympathy. One should present oneself favourably. Carla has a deep instinct for this. Liz, apparently, not. So reflected Carla Davis as she watched the woman whom she regarded as a rival, as a threat.

  Alix and Brian Bowen failed to see their old friend on television. They were too busy that evening watching the local news which carried a distressing story about a Northam boy who had been killed in a school playground by a crossbow bolt. One of Brian’s colleagues had put out a statement regretting that such a thing could have happened on Council property. Too cruel anywhere, had been Alix’s reaction to that, and she had rung Brian in his office when she heard this announcement on the news at lunch time. She never rang Brian in his office, not being a meddlesome wife, but this was too much. ‘For God’s sake, Brian,’ she said, agitated, ‘how could he had said something so stupid, so insensitive? Can’t you get them to put out another statement? It will do the Council terrible damage, if they go on repeating that all day.’

  Brian had indicated that he couldn’t speak then, that he would do what he could. But nevertheless, all day, relentlessly, on every news bulletin, local and national, this crass remark had been recycled and broadcast, and when Brian came home in the evening he and Alix sat miserably watching News from Northam, in which Stan Ackroyd said it straight to the eager camera. ‘He’s not a bad chap,’ said Brian, apologetically, ‘he’s just a bit slow, he’s not good with the press, he’s a nice man, really, he was trying to say the right thing.’

  Stan Ackroyd disappeared, mercifully, from the screen, and another face appeared, a plump smooth pale face, above a bow tie. It spoke knowledgeably about the dangers of crossbows. ‘Until we outlaw the crossbow,’ said this face, ‘we risk these terrible accidents daily.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it was an accident,’ said Alix, glumly. ‘He probably shot him on purpose. Have you ever seen a crossbow, Sam?’

  Sam shook his head. They don’t have them, in our place,’ he said. ‘Or not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Well, they’ll be on their way,’ said Alix. Tell me what t
hey look like, when you’ve seen one. And what people want them for.’

  ‘Retaliation, probably,’ said Sam, and told them about Ramesh Bannerjee’s reports of pigs’ trotters suspended from Muslim doorknobs.

  ‘Oh God, how disgusting people are,’ said Alix. And to think we left London to get away from the violence.’

  That’s not why we left at all,’ said Brian, reasonably.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Alix.

  ‘If you wanted to get away from violence, you’d have to go and live in an anchorage,’ said Sam, surprisingly.

  ‘An anchorage?’ queries Alix.

  ‘You know. One of those places where anchorites live. Where they wall themselves up. There was one at Ogham, Tony says. Twenty years inside, she did.’

  ‘Did she ever come out?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think she died in there.’

  ‘Well, I suppose she was safe from violence in there,’ said Alix. ‘But it’s rather an extreme solution. Almost defeats its own end. Like that poor chap in the Post Office in Earlsfield Road who died of a heart attack behind his grill because nobody could get through the security to give him the kiss of life. There they all were, lined up, doctors, ambulance, fire brigade, and they couldn’t get through to him quick enough. So he died in there, safe with all the Post Office savings accounts, and sheets of stamps, and pension books, and ten-pound notes. Quite safe, and quite dead. In his cage.’

  ‘Who told you that one?’ asks Brian, who has not heard it before.

  ‘The man in the Earlsfield garage. I said to him. I’m just leaving the car there while I pop into the Post Office to buy some stamps, and he said don’t do that, it’s all locked up, the old man’s snuffed it. And then he told me how.’

  ‘The Post Office anchorite,’ said Sam. ‘A tale of our times.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re not called anchorages,’ said Alix. ‘You’ve confused me.’

  ‘I don’t see why they shouldn’t be,’ said Sam, and reached for the dictionary. ‘Yes, here we are. Anchorage, a place inhabited by a recluse, hermit or anchorite. From the Greek, anakhoreo, to retire.’

  ‘How very odd,’ said Alix, puzzled. ‘I was sure they were something to do with harbours, not hermits.’ .

  ‘Same thing,’ says Brian, who has noticed that Sam is teasing his mother. ‘You know, it’s like in that Hopkins poem, “I have desired to go where springs not fail . . . where the green swell is in the havens dumb, and out of the swing of the sea”, or something along those lines. The nun, the anchorite. Heaven-Haven, is that its title?’

  ‘How very odd,’ repeats Alix, as false, ill-derived, delusive yet somehow persuasive images of nuns and green harbours fill her mind. Peaceful images, far from the savage playground and the crossbow.

  Cliff and Shirley Harper also watched a bit of local news, took in the crossbow story, then flipped channels to discover quite by accident Liz talking about teenage sex and suicide. They settled to watch in silence. Shirley could not tell whether Cliff was listening or not. She herself was listening with only half her attention. The sight of Liz annoyed her. What had she got to be so pleased with herself about? But everybody else on the programme annoyed her too. Talk, talk, talk. Fools the lot of them.

  Romeo and Juliet, childhood sweethearts, death on the railway line. She and Cliff had been childhood sweethearts. They hadn’t had sexual intercourse before the age of consent, not quite, but they’d done everything they could think of, short of penetration. Heavy petting, it was disgustingly called, in the fifties. Seventeen, just seventeen, Shirley had been, when she had opened her legs for Cliff in a field of long grass and shiny buttercups and pollenladen cow parsley. She had opened her legs and pulled him into her. And they had married young, and had three children, and now those three children had grown up and left them. Celia, the clever one, was studying Ancient History at Oxford, and although she still had a bedroom at home she rarely visited it now. Shirley didn’t blame her. There wasn’t much going on at Blackridge Green. Celia had escaped, she had flown high beyond the reach of bolts and arrows. She had no sweetheart, Shirley suspected. She worked, and worked.

  Cliff muttered to himself. Shirley switched channels, to get rid of Liz and the end of Liz’s programme, and discovered yet another programme about sex; an AIDS warning, complete with a giant plastic penis, some uneasy jokes and an array of brightly coloured condoms. A mad world we live in, thought Shirley. She and Cliff were like strangers now. Nothing interesting, thought Shirley, will ever happen to me again.

  A week later, in mid-March, Cliff Harper committed suicide. Shirley found him in the car in the garage, lying back on the reclined driver’s seat, with a piece of tubing leading from the exhaust and in through the small back window. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Shirley stood her distance, her hand still on the remote-control button that worked the automatic roll-up door. It was nine o’clock in the morning. She had gone to the garage to look for her secateurs.

  Should she advance, see if he was really dead? She knew he was. She edged forward. He was lying back, his mouth open, his eyes open and sunk back, his face a soapy blue-yellow. The key was in the ignition. Gingerly, delicately, she tried the door. It was locked. She peered inside. The passenger door was locked too. He had locked himself in, had done it properly.

  A cold sweat stood on her forehead, her heart beat loudly. Maybe the garage was still full of gas? She backed away. How long had he been there? How could one tell? He had left for Manchester the night before, had said he was spending the night in Manchester. Had he driven back in the night and done this thing? Or had he never left for Manchester at all? Had he been lying there dying while she was watching the last episode of The Crystal Ball? Would she not have heard the car engine?

  He was sealed into the car as into a tomb. It did not occur to her that she had a key to the car in her desk. She never drove Cliff’s car, it was too wilful for her, it frightened her, she hated its power steering. Cliff had been very proud of it.

  She found herself backing out of the garage, glancing nervously around to see if she was overlooked. She pressed the button and the door rolled down like a crematorium shutter. Untouched, Cliff lay there in his double sepulchre. She had not even touched his hand.

  She went back into the house, stood in her kitchen, put the kettle on. She supposed she ought to call a doctor, an ambulance, the police. But did none of these things. She made herself a cup of tea. Why hurry? There was nothing to hurry about. A lot of horrible things would begin to happen quite soon, whatever she did. She was quite angry with Cliff.

  She could pretend she hadn’t found him, she could have one last dull normal day. It was a fluke that she’d gone to look for her secateurs. She’d been intending to use them to chop up some picture wire with which she was attempting to mend the handle of the cloakroom lavatory. If she hadn’t had this sudden fit of do-it-yourself, of not waiting for Cliff, Cliff could have lain there all day. She never went near the garage in a normal day’s routine: her own car was parked outside on the short driveway. If Cliff had fixed the lav when she’d asked him, she would never have found him.

  This sentiment seemed so like the sort of thing her mother-in-law would have thought and said that Shirley was quite taken aback.

  Had Cliff left a note? She hadn’t seen anything in the car, but then, she hadn’t looked. Shirley had never seen a dead person before. She had declined the undertaker’s invitation to view her mother.

  Did Cliff’s death mean that his financial situation was even more dire than he’d let on? Or did it simply mean that he was even more depressed than she’d thought?

  She didn’t look forward to finding out. She drank her hot tea.

  Perhaps she’d never find out. She could commit suicide too. A joint suicide. Childhood sweethearts. A pact. She could swallow pills, or put a plastic bag over her head, or jump off a high building.

  She shuddered at the thought of the high building. Cliff had chosen the best way, the decent modern way. The
re wasn’t room in the garage for another car.

  But really, thought Shirley, washing up her cup and saucer, really, I don’t much want to commit suicide.

  She unstacked the dishwasher, wiped down the stainless steel sink, sat down again at the kitchen-table, picked up the newspaper, read a few items. Cross-Channel ferry disaster. President Reagan. Interest and mortgage rates.

  She was still angry. How dare he land her in such a mess? Whatever was she supposed to do now?

  Shirley’s father, of whom she had no recollections at all, had also committed suicide, shortly after her birth. Or so she rather recently had been told. He had been charged with the offence of indecent exposure, and had committed suicide shortly after his acquittal. Had hung himself, or so Clive Enderby said, in a disused warehouse on Jubilee Road.

  Well, said Shirley to herself, aloud, this is ridiculous. She thought of ringing Celia, or her son Barry, or her sister Liz, or her brother-in-law Steve. But recoiled from such a prospect as much as she recoiled from the high building.

  She began to feel strange, airy, irresponsible. She went up to the bedroom that she and Cliff had shared for fourteen years, for more than half their married life. She pulled a small suitcase out from under the bed, dusted it. She opened drawers, opened the wardrobe, took out at random tights, pants, skirts, jerseys, blouses. She packed a sponge bag. She went downstairs.

  She opened another little drawer and took out two rings, a necklace, a bracelet and some brooches; opened her desk, found her passport, put it in her handbag. So Cliff had left no message, had left without a message. Two can play at that game, said Shirley to herself. She walked out of the house, locked the door.

  She got into her car, switched on the engine, and drove off, waving as she passed Joan Halliwell on the corner walking her Airedale. She drove down to the shopping mall, parked, got out, bought herself a pound of apples. She drove on, to the next suburb, where she parked again. She approached the cashpoint of the Midland Bank on the corner, waited politely for her turn, inserted her card, requested and read the balance. £495 in her current account. She hesitated. Then she pressed the digits. The machine squeaked responsively. She collected her card, collected her money, put them in her bag, got back in the car. She counted her credit cards. American Express, Access, Gold Standard, Midland, Midland Gold. Cliff had been liberal with credit cards.