A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  She put the bag on the passenger’s seat, hesitated once more, then drove away, towards the M 1.

  ‘What do you mean, vanished?’ said Alix to Liz.

  ‘Vanished,’ repeated Liz, her voice over the telephone hitting a note of unseemly but probably hysterical mirth. ‘Vanished. Not a sign of her.’

  ‘And Cliff was dead in the garage?’ repeated Alix, stupidly.

  ‘So they tell me. Been dead for days, they tell me.’

  ‘And Shirley . . . ?’

  ‘Not a sign of her.’

  ‘But Cliff . . . hadn’t been murdered, had he?’

  ‘No, no, of course not—well, at least I assume of course not—hey, wait a minute, are you suggesting that my sister Shirley murdered him? You’ve got murder on the brain. You move in murderous circles, Alix.’ Liz laughed, wildly. ‘No, it’s a nice idea, but I don’t think Shirley did murder him, I think he committed suicide, and she ran off. Though whether she ran off before or after he killed himself I don’t know. All I know is what they told me.’

  ‘Just now?’

  ‘Well, not long ago. About two hours ago. I’ve been ringing you for hours.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alix, guiltily. ‘I was out. At Beaver’s. Working.’

  ‘Anyway, I don’t know what to do,’ said Liz. ‘They thought she might have come here. But she hasn’t. I had Cliff’s brother Steve on the phone. He’s in a shocking state. He seemed very angry with me, for some reason, as though it were all my fault. Which it can hardly be, can it?’

  ‘So nobody knows what happened, is that it? Why he killed himself, when he killed himself, why she disappeared, when she disappeared?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a crime to disappear,’ said Liz. ‘But I suppose it may be. It’s suspicious, anyway. Definitely suspicious. Disappearing is suspicious. I suppose I’ll have to come up to Northam to see what’s what. Have you ever had the misfortune to meet Shirley’s mother-in-law? She’s a classic. You would hardly credit. I’m sure everyone knows why Cliff did it, it’s because his business has gone bust, but you’d think he’d have done something a bit more subtle.’

  ‘Perhaps he was too upset to think clearly,’ ventured the charitable Alix.

  Liz snorted. ‘Ha,’ said Liz.

  ‘You can come and stay with me, if you like,’ said Alix. ‘The house is quite comfortable now, I’ve had central heating put in the spare room.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Liz. ‘I don’t like to be in the way. Maybe I’ll stay in that hotel. I’d better get on to that chap Enderby, I suppose. I’ll give him a buzz and find out whether it’s a crime not to aid and abet one’s husband’s suicide. I wonder if the law is clear on this point. Apparently her car has vanished, but nobody knows when it went. Nobody noticed. Nobody notices anything in that dead-alive little pelmeted suburb. You could rot for months. I’m amazed they ever found him. Will you be around tomorrow evening, if I decide I do have to come up?’

  ‘I’ve got to go to prison in the afternoon,’ said Alix. ‘I’m off to see P. Whitmore. But yes. I’ll be in in the evening. Brian’s out, teaching his evening class on the Victorian novel. But Sam and I will be in. We’ll make you some supper. And do stay, why spend money on a hotel?’

  ‘I like spending money,’ said Liz. ‘It cheers me up.’

  Alix laughed.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Liz, ‘what a nuisance my family are. If it’s not one, it’s another.’ But she didn’t sound too put out. It would take more than a suicide and a vanishing trick to upset Liz Headleand.

  Alix drove across the wet moor. The car was peaceful, quiet, for the bottle-bank bottles in the boot were muffled by the Oxfam intended cast-off garments. It was cold, but there was a hint of warmth in the air, and the light had a golden misty tinge. Springtime, the turning of the year, the sweet of the year. Alix intensely enjoyed her solitary drives, her occasional solitary walks. Sometimes she thought she enjoyed them too much. The buried romantic dreamer of her childhood was coming to life again in her, in these northern lights and levels. A battle was being waged in her between the romantic and the statistical, the solitary and the sociological. Her good angel and her bad angel. But which was which?

  She passed the turning to Ogham Abbey, and thought of the immured anchorite in her twenty-year seclusion, staring at the sky through a high window, denying herself the beauties of the natural world, denying herself the snowdrops and the coltsfoot, the violets and the moss, indulging herself only in clouds. And then thought of the more gregarious Fanny Kettle, Tony Kettle’s strange mother, whom she had met the week before at a reception at the Holroyd Gallery. Fanny and Alix had bumped into one another first in the solid polished antique Ladies’ Room, as they took off their coats, Alix divesting herself of an old blue raincoat, and Fanny Kettle of something that might have been a mink. But Fanny Kettle had been incongruously encumbered by a shopping trolley full of groceries which rather cramped her style. They had eyed one another, cautiously, in the mirror, as, side by side, they touched up their complexions—Alix dabbing a little powder fiercely on her nose, Fanny paying more elaborate attention to eyelashes and lips. They had half smiled at one another, as women do in such accidental proximity. Then, five minutes later, out in the high Victorian hall, a monument to past civic pride, they had been formally introduced, and had claimed contact through their sons. Sipping a glass of white wine, they had discussed the education of their sons, and the social potential of Northam. Fanny got on to the subject of parties in no time. ‘You must come round,’ she said to Alix, pressingly, ‘I’m trying to organize a big house-warming party, you must come, and bring your husband and that nice boy of yours.’

  Alix smiled, a little forbiddingly, and said that Brian was not much of a party-goer, and was only here tonight in the course of duty.

  ‘But one mustn’t be cramped by them,’ cried Fanny, with spirit, reaching deftly with practised timing for another glass from a passing tray. ‘Husbands always hate parties. Come alone, if he won’t come. We’re entitled to our own amusements, aren’t we?’

  Alix smiled again, not very encouragingly. Fanny Kettle struck her as vulgar. Intriguing, but vulgar. Ian Kettle had not been on view at the Art Gallery. It was not clear why Fanny Kettle had been invited.

  The party had been in aid of an exhibition to celebrate the centenary of the death of Northam’s one well-known nineteenth-century artist, Simon Blessed, whose vast canvases of moorland scenes and shooting parties had once been much prized by the wealthy manufacturers of the neighbourhood. He had fallen out of favour, inevitably, but had been to some extent rehabilitated, largely through gossip about his private life, which had leaked out gradually over the decades in biographies of his contemporaries, in footnotes, in little monographs: Blessed, to outward appearances a pillar of respectability, had in fact been a man of the greatest private eccentricity, a good-natured and philanthropic homosexual who seemed to have been more in touch with his own impulses than most of the eminent Victorians. A new Life, published this week, would tell all. There, in the gallery, had been its author, a self-effacing, bearded young gentleman aged, in Alix’s eyes, about twenty-two. Alix had spoken to him, briefly, politely, beneath a massive scene of feathered slaughter. ‘You should look at the smaller canvases,’ he had said, ‘they’re quite different, they tell another story altogether.’ And she had meant to do so, but had not found time, in the throng, with all the people that she now seemed to know in Northam clustering and chattering around her and at her.

  The new Northam had taken Simon Blessed back to its bosom, now he had proved to be both kind and deviant: looking around at the varied guests, Alix had thought that Northam had a good heart. One would not guess this from the national press, but here, in this civic gathering, one could not but warm to Northam’s style. The assembly was comically mixed: dumpy little women with soft Yorkshire voices and sharp opinions, tall county women with loud braying voices and mild opinions, soberly suited professors, young men in rainbow silk tie-dyed s
hirts, a weatherbeaten girl in dungarees who lived in a bender at the Gloseley US nuclear base, a bearded Shavian gentleman with a baby in a rucksack on his back, the mayor with his chain of office, the Chief Executive of TV North, and brooding intensely over the scene, an exotic white-faced androgynous creature dressed in sequined black, with long black hair and bold blue lips and jet jewellery. ‘He calls himself the Black Orchid,’ local broadcaster Tony Trough ton had told Alix, ‘but nobody knows who he really is.’ Tony had brought along his six-year-old son, a delightful lad who entertained himself at knee level by making strange quiet comforting farmyard noises at two outer-space, plastic monsters which he was clutching in his little hands. They’re frightened, you see,’ he told Alix, ‘by all these people.’ Alix had moved on to speak to Perry Blinkhorn himself, the great man, and had complimented him on the richness of the gathering: Perry had taken this seriously, had considered it, had said that yes, it was a good crowd, yes, he was glad the gallery could put on an event like this and that the trustees had at last allowed wine to be served in the main hall, yes, he was glad that Blessed was getting a good show, but where was it all going to end, were we going to discover that everyone is really homosexual? ‘I mean,’ said Perry, puzzled, ‘I’m in favour of Gay Rights and all that, I mean in my position I have to be, but I do sometimes wonder. What do you think, Alix? Do you think we’re all bisexual? I can’t really believe that, whatever people say.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alix had said, touched by the unusual sound of honest doubt.

  ‘People say it’s my religious background, that I’m full of prejudice,’ said Perry. ‘And maybe I am.’

  ‘I think it’s a pity he had to paint all these dead animals,’ said Alix, ‘when he probably wanted to paint live young men.’

  ‘I take your point,’ said Perry, and turned to shake the hand of a ninety-year-old lady with a moustache and a walking stick who was claiming his attention. ‘Perry, Perry, you naughty boy,’ she was saying, as Alix wandered off to rescue Brian from the headmaster of St Anthony’s Infants.

  Yes, an odd scene, but a harmless one: tolerance, efforts at tolerance, inclusion rather than exclusion. Some might think it undignified, but surely they could not label it lunatic, fanatic?

  Thirteen miles to Ogham Abbey, the signpost had announced. Thirteen miles across the flatness. The Kettles had lived out that way, amongst the chariot burials. One day, thought Alix, I will turn off, on my way to see P. Whitmore, and visit the ancient ruins and the small dull town.

  Her mind turned to Paul Whitmore. He had written to her, enclosing a V O and saying that he had urgent matters to discuss with her. He had mentioned in his letter Alix’s old friend Esther Breuer, had said that he had a message for Esther. This had surprised Alix, who had rung Esther in Bologna in a fit of sudden anxiety and was reassured but not surprised to find that Esther had no idea what Paul Whitmore could possibly be on about. ‘I never exchanged a word with him, or hardly a word, in all those years,’ she said, emphatically. ‘And I certainly haven’t heard from him since. Well, I wouldn’t be likely to, would I?’ Alix and Esther had quickly abandoned the subject of P. W„ and had exchanged other news: about the book Esther was supposed to be writing, about Beaver and his papers, about Beaver’s ex-mistress in Pallanza. ‘Come to Italy in the spring and see her and me,’ Esther had suggested. ‘Please do, Alix. It would do you good.’

  ‘I don’t need good done to me, thanks,’ said Alix, a little briskly, resenting the suggestion that Northam, Beaver and prison-visiting might lack goodness. ‘But I would like to come. If I have time.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Esther. ‘Time!’

  When she arrived at Porston, Alix discovered that Paul Whitmore’s message for Esther concerned Esther’s potted palm. It was clearly in code: or was it?

  ‘I had this dream, you see,’ said Paul, about that potted palm she used to keep in the window of the red room. Do you remember it?’

  ‘Of course I remember it,’ said Alix. ‘She had it for years.’

  ‘I had this dream, it was on her doorstep, it was crying out. “Take me in, little sister, take me in, little sister,” it cried.’

  ‘Goodness,’ said Alix.

  ‘And when I woke up, I realized what it meant,’ said Paul.

  Alix listened, leaned forward, for revelation.

  ‘What it meant,’ said Paul, ‘was that she should never have put it out. They need to be indoors, those plants. It died, when she put it out on the front steps.’

  ‘But I think she put it out because it was dying anyway,’ said Alix. ‘She decided to sort of—finish it off.’

  ‘But that’s the whole point,’ said Paul. ‘It wasn’t really dying. They always look like that. Half dead. It suddenly came to me, when I woke up. That’s their natural look. When they look as though they are dying, they are really living. And that’s why it cried out, little sister, take me in. You tell your friend she needn’t have killed it. It was doing OK, that plant. Tell her not to do it again.’

  He spoke with urgency, as though much hung on Alix’s response. She faltered.

  ‘Of course I’ll tell her,’ said Alix, ‘though there doesn’t seem to be much point in telling her now. After all, it’s dead by now, poor thing. Well dead.’

  She recalled that Esther had said that Paul had expressed concern about the palm. It had been one of the few remarks that this silent young man had addressed to her, over their years of living under the same roof.

  ‘But she might get another,’ said Paul. ‘She might do it again.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Alix. ‘I don’t know if she’s got any pot plants at the moment. She’s gone to live in Italy, I haven’t seen the place where she lives now.’

  The conversation had become absurd, grotesque. Into Alix’s mind swam, involuntarily, the macabre details of a recent murder case in Leeds: a dentist and his wife, who had murdered their adopted Brazilian daughter (who knows why, or how?), had chopped her up into tiny pieces and buried her in a hundred different places—in the garden, under the floorboards, and, most horribly, in plant pots around the house. They had lived with bits of her buried beneath rubber plants and cheese plants and a winter-flowering jasmine. Alix wished she had not remembered these details, and hoped that Paul could not read her mind.

  But he had moved on to other thoughts.

  ‘My mother had a palm,’ he suddenly said, as it were, inconsequentially.

  ‘Yes?’ said Alix.

  ‘That’s why I know about palms,’ said Paul. ‘Hers was in the salon. It lived for years. But it was always going brown round the edges. She used to trim off the brown bits. It didn’t seem to mind. She had it for years.’

  Alix waited.

  ‘I don’t know where she went, my mother,’ said Paul, inno cently. He looked directly at Alix. It was an effort for him to do so. Usually he stared at the plastic-topped table, at the chipped ashtray.

  ‘Fifteen years ago, you say,’ said Alix, picking up threads from older conversations.

  ‘When I was fifteen,’ he agreed.

  Alix paused. She could see no option.

  ‘And you haven’t heard from her since?’ she asked, stalling.

  ‘No,’ he said. He looked at her again, then looked away. Pain and defeat and misery oozed out of him.

  ‘I used to hear you laughing,’ he said, suddenly. ‘I used to hear you and your friends laughing, downstairs. I used to wonder why you were laughing. I liked to hear you. I was always alone, you see. So I liked to hear you all laugh.’

  Alix stood condemned. What could she do, what recompense could she make, for this past laughter? For this harmless gaiety?

  ‘Well,’ said Alix, ‘I wonder if I can help? You’d better give me some idea of where to begin to look.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ said Liz. ‘That wretched palm. Deflection tactics. Quite subtle, really. I suppose it died when she ran off with the lorry driver?’

  ‘I suppose so. I didn’t ask.’

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p; ‘And she never surfaced again? None of those investigative journalists managed to dig her up during the trial?’

  ‘No. Nobody.’

  ‘“Little sister, little sister”,’ Liz repeated. ‘I wonder if he read fairy tales, as a little boy?’

  ‘I didn’t ask,’ said Alix.

  ‘I suppose it’s more likely that he read fairy stories than that he read Isabella and the Pot of Basil,’ said Liz. ‘Whose head was it that Isabella kept? Her brother’s?’

  ‘No, her lover’s. Her brothers murdered him. In a forest.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What do you mean, what fori People didn’t need a reason for murdering people. In those days. Any more than P. Whitmore did.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Liz.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Alix, ‘he’s right about palms. Horticulturally speaking. I looked them up in my houseplant book when we got back. They do go brown round the edges. Naturally. It’s what they do.’

  Liz wasn’t interested in palms, as palms. ‘Amazing,’ Liz continued, ‘the intelligence of dreams. The way quite stupid or unimaginative people can dream dreams of a stunning complexity. People who wouldn’t recognize a symbol in their waking lives, even if they fell over one.’

  ‘But I’m not quite sure what it’s a symbol of,’ said Alix. ‘It’s obviously something to do with his mother, but what?’