A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  The restaurant is surrounded by a waist-high moving conveyor belt, moving as relentlessly as the London Orbital, bearing dirty plates, cans, glasses, cups and saucers, discarded paper rubbish, smears of ketchup. She gazes at the menu, then at the food. It is disgusting. Glass compartments full of salads. Wilting lettuce leaves, dried-out mounds of cottage cheese, thin grey gelid ham, yellow-grey chicken. It is hard to tell which are the plaster models, which the Real Thing. Shirley shudders, moves to the hot foods, recoils from the heavy smell of grease, from the pots of gristle brew and dark gravy and wet cabbage, wanders back desperately to the salads, sickens, turns to the sandwiches, in despair takes a plate covered in cling-film, knowing it to be a mistake, but what else is there? She gets a pot of coffee, sits down, gazes round her.

  The room is full of waifs, witches, grotesques. Shirley has never seen such a miserable collection of people, such a gallery of unfortunates. What has gone wrong? Is this some outing for the disadvantaged, the disabled? No, it is Britain, round about Budget Day, March 1987. Shirley is appalled. An immensely obese woman spoons scarlet jelly from a cardboard dish. Two thin tall lanky youths devour a mountain of chips and swill from cans of Coca-Cola. A young couple with a baby, pale like convicts, glare into space as the baby wails and wails. An old man on crutches picks uneaten chips and crusts from the dirty plates on the passing conveyor belt. A young red-haired scruffy Irish girl with a back pack is in loud dispute with a pale-faced, fat, crumple-suited member of the management: she is about to be thrown out. A grim-faced middle-aged couple is engaged in bitter marital discussion about the route ahead. A four-foot dwarf weaves her way bravely between the plastic tables carrying a tray loaded with highly coloured cakes. Is this the prosperous south, the land of the microchip? Everybody looks half dead, ill from the ill wind. Their faces are white, pink, grey, chapped, washed-out, ill nourished, unhealthy, sickly, sickening. Shirley takes a bite of one of her sandwiches. It is dry, grey, it tastes of nothing. Shirley does not know whether she feels sorry for these tramps, these refugees, these motorway wanderers, or whether she feels she has nothing to do with them at all. Is she still part of the human race? Is this the human race, or are these shadows, ghosts, lingering afterthoughts? This cannot be what is meant.

  I am delirious, thinks Shirley. This is a dream, and these are apparitions. Perhaps, thinks Shirley, I died back there on the motorway. She takes a gulp of coffee. Surprisingly, it tastes of coffee.

  The plump managerial lout is manhandling the pale Irish girl. He is pushing her towards the exit. She resists, but halfheartedly. Nobody pays any attention. She is not shouting. She is hardly even mumbling.

  Shirley shudders, drinks her coffee, stares through the high glass window at the flow of traffic beneath. Wet flakes of snow swirl in the wind.

  Up in north Staffordshire, the weather is better. If Alix had not been so dreading her appointment with Bill Whitmore, she would have been enjoying the drive. It is cross country, and Sam and Brian have worked out a route for her. It is open on the passenger’s seat: their nice clear writing and red arrows are reassuring. The heavy industry of South Yorkshire and the north Midlands gives way to that strange mix of town and country, that no-man’s-land which she thinks of as Lawrence landscape. And this in turn, as she reaches the land that lies just south of the Peak, becomes deeply rural, agricultural, Green England. The sun is shining brilliantly on scattered snow drifts, on green fields, on sparkling brooks, on mossy tree trunks, on a herd of muddy white prehistoric cattle, on the grey stone walls of a little ruin. She winds down the car window, and smells the fresh cold sap of spring.

  It is only ten miles now to the small town where Paul Whitmore spent his childhood, where his father owned a butcher’s shop, where his mother permed and fashioned hair. Alix has written to William Whitmore, requesting an interview, and has received a reply. He will see her. That is all he said. Dear Mrs Bowen, Thanks for your letter. The day you suggest will suit. Sincerely. She plans to arrive at tea time, a harmless time that will involve no fuss, no hospitality, but which will give him an opportunity to put the kettle on to distract himself, if he is that kind of man, if he is so inclined. It is now only three; she will drive on to Toxetter, park, have a walk round. Look for clues.

  She has never been here before. She parks in front of what she at first takes to be a disused cinema, but then registers as, indeed, a cinema. Everything here looks slightly disused. The films (three a week, all American) are current, indeed almost new, far too new for Alix, but the posters announcing them look tatty, already out of date. A handsome large old red brick building flanking the cinema forecourt is falling to pieces: its rafters are exposed, its windows gape, but housed in its centre, in two rooms saved from time, is something that describes itself as The Pets Parlour’. Alix walks down the street, past tiny little shop windows, towards what she senses to be the town centre: shops selling knitting wools, bicycle parts, baby clothes, some with their windows covered with a strange orange-yellow shiny transparent cellophane. A barber’s has three objects in its window: a photograph of a young man with a Brylcreemed hairstyle from the fifties, faded (through lack of yellow filter?) to a dangerous hard pale blue-pink; a pre-AIDS Durex advertisement; and a vast marmalade cat. Alix pauses, stares at the cat, says Hello, Puss. The cat blinks and smirks, safe behind its window, in the spring sun.

  And here is a pedestrian precinct, with fish and chip shops, shops selling birthday cards and gifts. The Maltings, Tudor Fayre, the refurbished Old Saddler’s Yard offer unconvincing, indeed psychotic, attempts to combine modernity and fake antiquity. Standing alone, set slightly back from the muddle, is another handsome red brick house, with a conservatory, with bay windows, a garden with crocuses, a clump of fine purple-green hellebore. Next to it, another muddle of an ancient building, part of it now housing the Manpower Services Commission, and part of it, in a strange hut-like plywood annexe, the branch library. Another wool shop, called the Beehive. A lady’s hairdresser (subtitled Unisex) called Tangles. A television rental shop, and on the roof of its outside lavatory in the back yard a dish receiver. And then, suddenly, clustered together, almost cheek by jowl, an extraordinary density of butchers. Never has Alix, in one small town, seen so many butchers’ shops. How can they all survive? Could one small town ever eat so much meat? Yards and yards of meat, red, glistening, display themselves. Chunks of braising steak, trays of kidneys, hundreds of chump chops, layers of liver, great circles of rolled beef, wave upon wave of overlapping sirloin and rump. There are also puddings, tripes, pies, pasties. But red meat dominates, red red meat, crazily decked and adorned with unexpected oranges and cherries. There are oranges and cherries everywhere, they are not signs of single originality but of mass dementia. A whole beach of bright red mince, six feet wide, rippled in a silver tray, is stuck with orange slices and plastic greenery. Meat sculpture.

  Alix is amazed. She had not realized that this part of England was so full of meat. No wonder Paul Whitmore is a vegetarian.

  She has reached the town centre, with its building societies and its weathered market cross. Is this place derelict or prosperous? She cannot tell. How does it vote? She cannot tell.

  It is four o’clock.

  Reluctantly, she retraces her steps, past shops that seem almost friendly now in their familiarity. She dawdles, lingers. She can see the shop, a two-storey building. Upstairs, the closed salon. The windows are boarded. The butcher’s below is also closed. Its window carries a notice saying ‘Closed through Circumstances Beyond My Controll’. There are empty steel trays, an insect-death-ray machine, a garland of plaster sausages, and two plaster pigs in butcher’s aprons, which have fallen over on to their sides. She pauses, peers through. She sees a great wooden slab, stained and impregnated by decades of old blood. The floor is covered still in sawdust shavings. Death of man and animal.

  The doorbell to the flat, Paul had told her, was down the side alley. She opens the wooden gate, nervously presses the bell. She is hoping Paul’s fa
ther will not answer, that he will have changed his mind, that he will refuse to see her. But she hears coughing, shuffling, as somebody descends the stairs, peers through the frosted panes of glass, fiddles with the latch. The door opens, and there is William Whitmore.

  They shake hands, and Alix follows him upstairs to the sitting-room. He says he will make her a cup of tea, and disappears into the kitchen. Alix looks around her, at a room of unexceptional ordinariness. Flowered carpet, shabby flowered loose-covered three-piece suite, gas fire, television set on a small metal-legged table, useless brass coal-scuttle, some brass and copper ornaments, a few framed family photographs on the mantelpiece, a sunburst clock that ticks. In the corner there is a grandfather clock that does not tick. The only feature of interest is a palm in a pot. Alix wonders if it could be the same palm, the palm that Paul knew as a boy, the palm that will live and die for ever.

  Bill Whitmore returns with a tray, settles himself, pours. They speak of the weather, of the approach of spring, of the pleasant sunshine, of the nip in the air.

  He is, like Paul, slightly below average height, slightly built, perhaps becoming a little bowed and shrunken. His hair is grey-brown, short, neat, combed fiercely back and flattened down. He is wearing grey trousers, a blue shirt, a maroon tie, a grey cardigan, soft shoes which are not quite bedroom slippers. A pink, clean face, and National Health glasses of the same model as Brian’s. He sags, slightly, as though some spring had given. But is trim, orderly, he has not let himself go. There is something in the fussy manner in which he marshals sugar, biscuits, teaspoons, that indicates the habits of one who has lived long alone, of one who tries to maintain proprieties against some odds.

  Alix’s chair sags too, unevenly. She sits cautiously, tensely.

  They continue to speak of the weather.

  Alix clears her throat.

  ‘Mr Whitmore,’ she says, ‘did you know I’d been seeing your son Paul? Does he write to you at all?’

  He heaves a terrible sigh, and says nothing.

  ‘He wanted me to . . . make contact,’ she says.

  ‘Are you from the prison?’ he asks.

  ‘No. No. I’m just a friend.’

  She pauses to let this sink in, then continues. ‘There’s no point in explaining how I got to know Paul, I used to teach in a prison in London, then when my husband was moved up here, well, I sort of took to visiting him.’

  He did not look at her. He stares at the tea leaves in the bottom of his gold-rimmed rose-patterned real china cup.

  ‘Are you religious?’ he asks eventually.

  Alix pauses, hesitates, unsure how to answer this on any level, even to herself.

  ‘No,’ she finally ventures, in a tone that has a faint hint of interrogation. Then what is your motive, his prolonged silence seems to imply. She sips her tea. She does not know the answer.

  He clears his throat.

  ‘I had to shut up shop,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ says Alix. ‘Paul told me he thought you had.’

  ‘But I’m not moving,’ said Bill Whitmore. ‘They’ll not get me to move.’

  ‘Why should you move?’ agreed Alix, who could think of many reasons.

  ‘If I’d been going to move, I’d have moved earlier. All those years ago.’

  Alix puts down her tea-cup. This seems promising. She leans slightly forward, attentively. He says nothing.

  ‘Yes?’ she prompts.

  He sighs, heavily.

  ‘Paul wanted me to ask’—she hesitates, then comes out with it—‘after his mother. He wondered if you knew where she is.’

  The little man slumps deeper into his chair, stares intently at the poor flowered carpet. Alix wants to run away, to run out of the stuffy little room and down the stairs and out, down the street, back to her car, and off, off across England. But she sits it out.

  ‘Some questions,’ says Bill Whitmore, ‘are best left unasked.’

  ‘He did want to know,’ whispers Alix, softly.

  The old man makes a sound like a snort or a groan, and suddenly begins to speak, in a low, urgent, bitter flow. ‘He may well ask,’ he says, ‘he may well ask. Does he think she’ll welcome him with open arms, after what he’s done? She had no time for him even when he was a good lad, and he was a good lad, he was a quiet, good lad, wouldn’t hurt a fly, a quiet boy, was Paul, no harm in him, wouldn’t hurt a fly, couldn’t help me in the shop, oh no, far too squeamish to help in the shop, always hanging around his mother’s apron strings, but she wouldn’t have him, no, she’d no time for him, too busy she was with her ladies and her gentlemen, too busy, and does he think she’ll have any time for him now? She never wanted a boy, no, it was always a girl she’d wanted . . . oh, she’ll be wishing he’d never been born, she’ll be cursing the day he was born, she’ll be cursing the day she ever met me, even then she used to curse him and me, and what does he think she’ll think now, the prodigal son, no, she’ll be pretending we never existed, she’ll have wiped us out and forgotten us, she’ll be riding high and pretending she never knew nought, “Oh, what horrible murders,” she’ll be saying, how could anyone, must be a monster, yes, that’s what she’ll be saying, she never cared for Paul nor me, she tormented the lad, she teased him and tormented him, and he hung around after her as though she was God’s gift, but she wouldn’t have it, get off, she’d say, get off my back, shoo, scram, out from under my feet . . . no, she couldn’t be doing with him . . . ’

  As he rambled on, Alix listened, intently desperate to catch the story beneath the story: whenever the old man tried to mimic his wife’s voice he put on a strange, falsetto, fake-posh accent, was that a clue? High and mighty, she was now, for all that she was little better than a paid servant, Bill Whitmore continued. Clearly he knew exactly where she was, and what she was doing: but would he tell? Would he tell?

  Alix let him run down, into a sort of mumbling silence.

  ‘From what you say,’ she suggested, diffidently ‘she never seemed to care for him much, is that right? Not even when he was a little boy, a baby?’

  ‘Unnatural, she was,’ said Mr Whitmore. ‘Unnatural. I used to tell her, it’s not right. She never wanted a boy. Well rid of her, we were. No,’ he repeated, with emphasis, ‘she never wanted a boy.’

  His eyes wander towards the framed photographs on the mantelpiece, but Alix’s eyes do not follow them. She is too busy trying to piece together the story she thinks she is hearing.

  ‘And when she left,’ said Alix, ‘Paul was taken into care, is that right? And then he came back here to live with you for a while, is that right?’

  ‘He had to go,’ said the old man. ‘He had to go. I couldn’t cope. I was ill.’

  ‘Weren’t there grandparents, aunts, relatives?’

  He shook his head. ‘No good, they were. A bad lot, her family. I was warned off her. I should have listened. I should have had more sense.’

  ‘Were they from these parts?’

  ‘No, they were from Derby.’

  He relapsed into silence. Then repeated ‘Derby’, as though that explained all. Alix did not dare to ask him about his own family: he looked too crushed, too crumpled. She felt a terrible sorrow for him, as he sat there in his old armchair. She wondered if she dared pursue anything, whether she should try to talk to him about Paul, whether she should go away and try to come back another time.

  ‘Are you religious?’ she tries, as a diversion. He looks up, surprised, even smiles a small tight sad smile.

  ‘Nay,’ he says, ‘nay, not so as you’d notice. My family was. Chapel going, they were. But I never held with that stuff. All this with Paul, though, all this trouble—well, it makes you wonder.’

  She wondered what theological position he was pondering, as he sat there in his soft shoes. She knew what he meant, though, like him, could not work out why he meant it.

  ‘Songs of Praise I like,’ he offered. ‘The old tunes.’

  ‘Yes, so do I,’ said Alix, not wholly dishonestly.

&
nbsp; ‘Well, I suppose it’s good of you, to go and see the boy. I suppose I should thank you,’ he says, in what seems to be a preliminary to closing the meeting. Alix is tom between a desire to run for it, and a desire to stick it out just a sentence or two longer, a question or two more.

  ‘He needs somebody,’ says Alix. ‘And I don’t mind.’ She wonders whether to say that she finds Paul interesting, or whether this is too insulting a reflection to offer to this ruined man.

  ‘Well, I do thank you,’ he says, with some dignity. ‘Yes, I do.’

  Alix seizes her opportunity.

  ‘And his mother?’ she says. ‘You think there’s no hope? No point? I somehow feel it would mean so much to Paul. If she—if you both—could bring yourselves—well, to forgive him, I suppose I mean.’

  ‘Forgive? Forgive? What’s the point of that? I don’t blame the boy.’ He pauses, on this amazing statement. ‘It’s her I blame,’ he concludes. ‘Her.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Alix.

  He looks at Alix sharply, hesitates, speaks. ‘I’ll tell you where she is,’ he says. ‘I’ll tell you. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? Yes? I thought so. I’ll tell you what you want. She’s in Hartley Bridge. Yes, Hartley Bridge. Over your way. You’ll find her easy enough. I’ll get you the address.’

  Slowly, he rises to his feet, shuffles across the room: prematurely aged, a life collapsed in upon itself. He rummages in a drawer, produces a scrap of paper, and writes upon it, laboriously, copying from a notebook. ‘Hartley Court, Hartley Bridge, North Yorkshire,’ he writes, and hands it to her. ‘That’s her,’ he says. ‘That’ll find her.’