A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  Alix Bowen, sitting in Beaver’s attic sorting out a box of papers, wonders where Shirley has gone to, and whether she herself will ever find Paul Whitmore’s mother. People don’t disappear, she tells herself. Even Beaver’s famed disappearance had been only figurative, for during it all sorts of people had known perfectly well where he was and who he was. His colleagues, his wife, his children, his parents, his bank manager, his friends from the pub, his neighbours, his barber. Even his not very enthusiastic publishers.

  She wonders about Stephen Cox, and Cambodia. In Cambodia, people disappeared. But not in Britain, in the late twentieth century.

  Beaver’s papers are wonderfully inconsequential, defiantly lacking in chronology. A Final Notice dated 12 December 1978 from the Electricity Board in glowing red, demanding £24.89, is clipped to a handwritten letter from Faber & Faber dated 5 June 1939, explaining the absence of royalties. A vicious anonymous review from The TLS of a volume by Geoffrey Grigson with the note ‘I wrote this’ is paper-clipped to a restaurant bill, dated 1932, from Bertorelli’s for £2 2s. 6d. What appears to be a fragment of a poem is written on the back of a draft of a letter to The Times, noting that Our Queen has been forced to take part, surely against her will, in the rubber-stamping of the execution of a young man in Jamaica. ‘I protest, on Her Majesty’s behalf, and on behalf of a country that has wisely seen fit to abolish capital punishment, against this indignity committed in her name,’ declares a Beaver of the late 1960s. Alix wonders if he ever finished the letter, ever sent it, ever had it published? Would a biographer have to follow up such clues? What a nightmare, thinks Alix. Occasionally Beaver hints that it would be convenient if Alix herself were to become his recording angel. She finds the idea faintly obscene.

  I have become a detective, thinks Alix, as she wonders how to file what appears to be a pile of old reports from Hansborough Secondary School. They have so far been lovingly preserved, as though Beaver had been proud of his classroom prowess. Number of Pupils in Form, 23, Place in Form, 1. Occasionally he was beaten into a humiliating second place by a character called Maud Hand, but most of the time he was on top. His childhood sweetheart (later his wife), Bertha Sykes, hovered supportingly in the middle ranks. Maud must have been a thorn in Beaver’s flesh. Alix wondered what had happened to her. Dare she raise her name, one day, over lunch, as a diversion from the ex-mistresses and the ill-used, lamented Bertha?

  Class places, examination marks, marks for everything. Naked competition. At the bottom of each page, in red print, it was stated that ‘On the withdrawal of a pupil from school, a term’s notice, in writing, addressed to the Headmaster or to the Clerk, is required. In default, a term’s fees are payable.’ How had they paid, what had they paid with, these sons and daughters of South Yorkshire miners? Alix had been under the illusion that education, in the 1920s, had been free. She knows she knows nothing.

  Alix opens another little bundle. It is full of references for the young Beaver, hopeful and frequently disappointed applicant for teaching posts in schools up and down the country. Some of the references strike Alix as inattentive or lukewarm. There is one from that great classical scholar, Hubert Hawkins. On it, an older Beaver has scribbled, ‘Couldn’t remember me from Adam, could he?’

  There is something mournful about the bundle. Alix drops it, and for light relief picks up a dusty but much more recent box of slides. She has a slide viewer to hand (Bertha had been a keen and hopeless photographer), and she starts to peer at coloured images of the fifties and sixties. They are all jumbled up: scenes of Swiss mountains alternate with Hadrian’s Wall, Rome is mixed up with the Rhine, and a wholesome array of Scandinavian barns is enlivened by a good (museum-bought) shot of the Bog Man of Tollund, smiling his sweet smile of everlasting anguish, of enigmatic resignation. There is a sequence of ill-shot views of the sea, showing bits of boat rail and sloping deck and occasionally a small distant object on the horizon—a rock, a lighthouse?—and slipped amongst them a view of a formal Italian garden with statuary and white peacocks and a fountain and a distant lake. She continues through the box, and is rewarded by a shot of Bertha Beaver sitting on a beach in a deck-chair in a plastic rainhood, by a shot of the broad backside of Beaver as he leans to stroke a dog of which only the tail and a quarter of the rump are visible. And here is Beaver standing in a garden, wearing a ridiculous scarlet and black furred robe and a medieval hat, and here is a snap of a tortoiseshell cat. And who are these figures, sitting in the sun and wrinkling up their eyes against the light? That is Bertha, her legs planted wide apart, her skirt rucked up to let the sun get at her knees, and that is Beaver, dark-glassed, in a Panama hat, and that, surely, is Robert Graves? Today, when Alix descends from her attic to join him for lunch (cold baked beans, tomatoes, salami, many slices of white bread, and a banana—his choice), Beaver wants to talk about the woman in Pallanza, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, the woman who is the queen of his Novara sequence. Alix says she has found no snaps or slides of her.

  ‘She didn’t like having her picture taken,’ says Beaver. ‘A captivating creature. But my God she was plain.’

  ‘Then why was she captivating?’ asks Alix, spreading her bread with a novel highly coloured polyunsaturated spread: Beaver, in his eighties, has suddenly stopped eating butter because of its cholesterol content.

  ‘Her conversation,’ says Beaver. ‘She could talk. And talk and talk and talk.’

  ‘Sounds awful, to me,’ says Alix, who is permitted liberties, is encouraged to take liberties.

  ‘She was awful,’ says Beaver. ‘But she was rich.’

  ‘So it wasn’t her talk,’ says Alix. ‘It was her money.’

  ‘They make a stunning combination,’ says Beaver. They both laugh. Then he falls a little silent, as he chews on his salami and then vigorously with his buckled fingernail extracts a bit of rind from his surprisingly fierce teeth, and lays it, spittle-covered, on the plastic tablecloth.

  ‘Bertha,’ he says, reflectively, ‘Bertha, she was neither rich nor talkative nor pretty. You never met my Bertha.’

  ‘No,’ says Alix.

  ‘Bertha was the love of my life,’ says Beaver, mournfully, sentimentally, spearing another slice of salami. He sighs, chews, sighs. Alix says nothing, rather loudly. This too is her liberty.

  ‘Well, never mind,’ says Beaver, reaching for his banana. ‘Let’s talk about something cheerful. Tell me some more about your murderer.’

  Clive Enderby is on the phone to his brother Edward. ‘But I thought Janice knew Shirley Harper quite well,’ he insists. Edward repeats his denial: Janice and Shirley were acquainted, their daughters had been at the same school, they had greeted one another at school concerts and Parents’ Evenings, but that was about it, there was no more to it than that.

  ‘There’s absolutely no trace of her,’ says Clive. ‘She’s vanished off the face of the earth. Nobody seems to have any idea where she might have gone to. No living relatives apart from her sister, no friends.’

  ‘Maybe she’s run off with a man?’ suggests Edward.

  Clive had not thought of this possibility, but it strikes him as implausible.

  ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘she’s not that kind of woman.’

  ‘How do you know what kind of woman she was? How does anybody know what kind of woman anybody is?’ asks Edward.

  Edward laughs, not happily.

  Clive is silent. His gaze wanders round his lounge and settles on the mantelpiece. There reposes a large white gilt-edged invitation card, IAN AND FANNY KETTLE, AT HOME, HOUSEWARMING PARTY. 7.30 ONWARDS, it reads.

  Clive’s wife Susie seems to have become quite friendly with Fanny Kettle.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says to his brother Edward, ‘if Janice does think of anything, any kind of clue, tell her to let me know.’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ repeated Edward irritably, ‘she hardly knew the woman.’

  Everyone seems eager to disown Shirley Harper. Even her own daughter Celia, who has finally been traced, do
es not have any Suggestions as to her whereabouts, and appears peculiarly unmoved by the domestic tragedy that has struck her family. Shock, assumes the Dean of her Oxford college, who does not know her: shock, assumes uncle Steve, who does not know her very well. There seems little point in tearing Celia away from her studies, so she stays on in Oxford. Liz tries to get in touch with her on the phone, fails, is obliged to leave a message for Celia asking her to contact Liz if she needs to. Celia does not get in touch. The Warden of the college, an acquaintance of Liz’s, does, however, make contact: he rings Liz and expresses anxiety on his ward’s behalf and bumbles on about feeling himself to be in loco parentis. Liz thinks this is decent of the old boy, and somewhat surprising. At the end of his bumbling he mentions to Liz as though in passing that his own son has been going through a few little difficulties not unconnected with hard drugs, and could Liz possibly suggest the name of a sympathetic psychiatrist: Liz ceases to be surprised, and helpfully suggests names.

  Shirley sits in a multi-storey car-park in Luton. She thinks of Cliff, slumped in the driver’s seat. He seems quite unreal to her. Much of her past life seems quite unreal to her. She walks round Luton, has a cup of tea in a department store, collects her car, and drives on, down the Ml, towards the south.

  Alix Bowen is alarmed to receive an immediate reply to her letter to Paul Whitmore’s father. Yes, he will see her. Oh dear. Her heart sinks. This time I’ve gone too far, she says to herself. She had no desire whatsoever to see Paul’s father, to try to trace Paul’s mother. How has she got herself into this position? It is one thing to rummage around in Beaver’s past, amongst old school reports and old photographs and scraps of manuscript and dead bills, trying to create order out of paper. People are another matter. Live people. She should never have followed up Paul Whitmore. She should have let him rot in his box. She is not even being paid to visit him, as she was paid to teach English Literature to his final victim, Jilly Fox. Despite all her protests, she has ended up, effectively, as Paul Whitmore’s unpaid, untrained social worker. Is this wrong, is it immoral, is it prurient, is it foolish, will it end badly? She is an amateur, rushing in where angels might fear to tread. She wishes she dare consult Liz more openly. But she dares not. She is afraid Liz will tick her off, as she has done in the past, for taking on tasks for which she is not qualified.

  And yet something in her knows that she is, despite all, doing the right thing. And maybe it will not be too bad? At least it will be ‘interesting’, she tells herself.

  But this is only a justification. She is going to see Paul Whitmore’s father because she believes it is the right thing. The phrase repeats itself in her head, as she bends in Beaver’s attic over yet another box of holiday slides. The right thing. A watery little unobserved smile hovers on her lips. Ah, the poverty of moral language, the poverty of discourse, the thin vagueness of words. Instinct, intuition, utility. Here sits Alix Bowen, in her fifties, battling with these concepts afresh, as though she were a girl still, as though nothing had ever been settled and sorted. As though there were still everything to play for.

  All things out of abstraction sail, mouths Alix to herself. Is it a line of a poem? All things out of abstraction sail, and all their swelling canvas wear.

  Downstairs sits the poet Beaver, watching the racing on TV. Out of that old carcase had sprung images. Berries, oak apples, mistletoe, emmer wheat and einkorn barley. And rhetoric.

  Does he, in his Indian summer, in his Lapland winter of rude health, recall his bronchial childhood, his mother’s fears of the pit? Alix nurses in her lap a letter from old Beaver’s mother. How has this letter survived? Has he cherished it? It is written to Howard Beaver in hospital, in Northam Children’s Isolation Hospital. It is dated 1912. ‘Dear Howard, I hope you are improving, I will be along as soon as they let me, I think of you night and day. Be a good boy. Your ever loving mother.’ What had it been? Influenza? Diphtheria? Scarlet fever? He had been a delicate child, little Howard, seventy-odd years ago, asthmatic, bronchial, chesty, like most children from the dirty industrial north. Infant mortality, child mortality, had been high here, in the early years of the century.

  Despite herself, yet again, Alix weeps. She is a hopeless sentimentalist. It is that phrase, ‘your ever loving mother’, that has done the trick this time. Her heart turns to her sons, whom she loves beyond all words, beyond all rhetoric, beyond all images and all imagining. They no longer need her love. Her love is a smothering cushion to them. Nicholas in Sussex, landlord in his farmhouse, inheritor of lands, painter of increasingly large canvases, lover of Use Nemorova. Sam at his sixth form college, studying,biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics. She is their ever loving mother, but so what?

  And, as a matter of fact, reflects Alix, drying her automatic tears, to tell the truth, she does not really think all that much about Nicholas, these days. She thinks far more frequently about Paul Whitmore. What does that mean?

  Alix has become a detective, but Shirley has become a criminal. She is on the run.

  She tries to remember tricks from the who-done-its she used to like in the old days, before she gave up reading. Faked suicides, bundles of clothes left on the beach, abandoned cars? It is too cold to fake a drowning. In March, nobody would commit suicide by drowning, not off the North Yorkshire coast. So Shirley decided, as she stared at the level grey sea at Robin Hood’s Bay, where once, on an outing with her friend June and her family, she had been happy.

  At the back of her mind, she has a vague plan. She herself does not know what it is, but it is forming itself, in the obscurity. It has no shape, no features, it has merely a mood, a colouring, like a forgotten dream. It pulls her southwards, down the Ml, south, towards the south coast, with her passport in her pocket.

  The solitude is intense. She has not spoken to anybody except shopkeepers and boarding-house owners since discovering Cliff. She feels an unperson. But something in her does not dislike this sensation.

  She is nearing London. Roads beckon her in all directions. The North, the South, the East, the West. Blue motorway signs, with large white lettering. The big M. She is in a slight daze. She has not been eating much. Something called the London Orbital, the M25, announces itself. Indecisively, she joins it.

  No Services on the Motorway, she is told. Places peel off: Potters Bar, the Dartford Tunnel, Sevenoaks, Gatwick, the South, Heathrow. She is travelling at a steady sixty, and seems unable either to slow down or to accelerate. Shall she go on for ever, round and round, until she runs out of petrol? Inertia appears to have her in its grip, the inertia of movement. Maybe she is hallucinating? She knows she should not be driving, that she is a danger to herself and others, but the mechanism offers no exit, and on she goes, round the full circuit of the one hundred and seventeen miles of the Orbital, on a conveyor belt, on a treadmill. She sees a sign to the North, to the Ml, beckoning her back to Cliff and the garage. She ignores it, and drives on. She passes flashing lights, a concertina of cars in the slow lane, roadworks. She recalls a news item of a woman her own age who had earlier this month driven the wrong way down the fast lane of the M4. She had ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Shirley’s eyes blur slightly, she resolves that she will leave the fated circle at the next exit, but for some reason does not. For some reason, for no reason, she is making her way back and on towards the Dartford Tunnel.

  The Dartford Tunnel, which is new to Shirley, does not impress her. She had been expecting something grander, more modern. She is now making for the M2 and Dover. The word ‘Dover’ has written itself upon her mind. Kent and Canterbury, the Pilgrim’s Way.

  A strange blue-green light is shining: she glimpses a vast landscape of cement-green-grey glittering water, quaking, ruffling, in a high invisible wind. Cooling towers, pit heads, industrial vistas, and then rural England, little stunted dwarfed orchards of apples and cherries, crabbed little trees, caravans, white soil, grey soil, polythene-glistening fields under plastic. The mini-garden of England. It looks poisoned, ashen, ruined b
y fertilizer, insecticide. The colours are glacial. The Ice Age, the last of England. A few flakes of snow fall from a clear sky.

  She will have to stop soon, for petrol, for the lav, for coffee. The Little Chef, the Happy Eater, the Roadside Diner. Will she be able to stop? Her foot seems to be stuck to the accelerator, as in some Grimm fairy story. She must make an effort. She slows down. Little deceleration signs take her in, she is sucked into a car-park. She stops.

  She sits for a moment at the wheel, shaking. She looks at herself in the driving mirror. Her cheeks are flatteringly pinked, deceptively normal, but beneath the rouge she looks and feels a very odd colour.

  She staggers out of the car, stiff-kneed, into a raw wet wind. The service station appears not to be finished. Mounds of pitch lie around the edges of the car-park, bordered by slices of cracked tarmac, buckled in heaps. Hoardings implore her to Buy Her Ferry Ticket Now, or to indulge herself in Low Tar Cigarettes. It is bitterly cold. She staggers, bowed, clutching her coat round her, towards the building, pushes at the door, finds the Ladies’ Room. It is squalid, there is no lavatory paper, the dispenser soap smells of hospitals or prisons, and the water in the taps is so rationed that it is impossible to get one’s hands under the jet for long enough to rinse them. Shirley sprays herself with a little Anaïs Anaïs. She still has her creature comforts about her. She powders her nose. Then thinks she will buy herself a bite to eat.