A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  The golden day. Maybe the teaching of the classics teaches us monstrosities rather than balance, wisdom, stoicism, reason.

  Alix wishes Stephen Cox were still in England, so she could ask him about these things. Stephen is interested in atrocity stories. But Stephen has vanished from the map of the known world.

  What level of intention can Paul Whitmore have had, when he murdered total strangers? Old Images of Forms . . . Rude and unknowing of the Artist’s Hand. Informia.

  Alix wonders if she should ring Liz anyway, wonders if there is any news about Shirley. There has been no news of Shirley for ten days.

  She reads on. Lucan’s epic is full of writhing serpents, severed limbs, foaming priestesses, rattling rocks, sulphurous portents, monstrous births and spouting blood. Ornate, psychotic stuff. How is he rated, now, as a poet? Alix cannot even construe the sentence about ‘Old Images of Forms’—what forms? She remembers that Celia Harper is reading some classical degree or other at Oxford. Celia would know. But are such things worth knowing?

  Alix sighs, shuts her book. She will write, once more, to the evil Angela, and if Angela does not reply, well, she will telephone. She has to know the answer. Whatever it may be.

  Liz and Charles Headleand are finishing their cheese and salad in St John’s Wood. Charles is about to fly off to Baldai, although now his departure has become a reality to him he has begun to share the common view of the fate of Dirk Davis. ‘All right,’ he concedes to Liz, ‘it’s just a psychological need on my part, I recognize that, I just feel I’ve got to make one last effort.’

  ‘You didn’t even like the man,’ says Liz.

  ‘No. But that’s not the point.’

  ‘I did like him, once,’ says Liz. ‘Do you remember the old days when he used to come and have supper with us in Harley Street with the crew? He used to be fun, in the old days.’

  ‘He was always too fucking big for his boots,’ says Charles. ‘An aggressive kind of chap, even in those days. A born troublemaker.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ says Liz, in a parody of wifely submission. They both laugh.

  ‘I read a piece in one of today’s papers,’ says Liz, ‘about the kind of money that videotape editors and television technicians and electricians are getting for overtime. It says someone from one of the breakfast television stations put in a claim for £90,000 for covering the volcano story in Sicily at the end of last year. And that equally exaggerated claims are being made over the Zeebrugge ferry disaster. Is this all true, or are these just atrocity stories?’

  ‘They’re true enough,’ says Charles. ‘I blame Dirk Davis. The ACTT is a monster. It’s time this government did something about it.’

  ‘And I blame you,’ says Liz, pleasantly. ‘People like you, with your passion for atrocities. I can’t see why people need to gaze at sinking ships and burning mountains.’

  ‘Can’t you? Wasn’t it you who dragged me up the slopes of Etna once, on a so-called holiday?’

  Liz stops, considers. She remembers Etna with pleasure. And Vesuvius also suddenly arises before her in classic form, smoking decoratively. It too had charmed centuries of visitors. Goethe had clambered up it, Tischbein had painted it. She had received a postcard-painting of it from an ex-patient on holiday only the week before. It still attracts. The ashen bodies of Pompeii, like Lindow Man, still attract.

  ‘Touché,’ says Liz. She is always open to argument from historical precedent.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Liz, ‘for God’s sake take care. I don’t want to be turned into a television widow. Not even a divorced television widow. It’s not my style.’

  The allusion to tragedy queen Carla goes down rather well, she thinks. Maybe Charles is going off her, at last? But if he is, what is that to her?

  They have already discussed the enigma of Shirley’s continuing disappearance. Liz has confessed that she is beginning to worry. Maybe Shirley is dead. There has been no trace of her or of her red Mini, although the police have been making inquiries. Liz takes up this thread again.

  ‘Maybe something really awful has happened to her,’ she says. ‘Or maybe she knows something we don’t know, and has run away from?’

  ‘Don’t you class Cliff’s suicide as something really awful?’

  ‘Well, yes, awful for Cliff, I suppose.’

  She drains her wineglass.

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘you see how important it is for you not to vanish. Think how embarrassing it would be for me, to lose both a sister and an ex-husband, all in the same month. It would look as though I’d planned it.’

  ‘That’s a very self-centred way of looking at it.’

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it? Well, there’s nothing new in being selfcentred.’

  She hesitates, continues.

  ‘I’ve always had it at the back of my mind, I suppose, that I was somehow responsible for my father’s death. Do you think I could have been?’

  Charles stares at her.

  ‘You? How can you have been? You were only an infant. What an odd idea.’

  ‘Odd ideas aren’t always false ideas.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s crazy. Just crazy.’

  ‘So do I, really. But I think that’s what I used to think, when I was little. That somehow my mother blamed me. And that therefore I was guilty.’

  ‘Well, really, Liz,’ says Charles, quite warmly, ‘I think that’s quite potty. I know what a lunatic your mother was, but I don’t think even she can have blamed a four-year-old for her husband’s behaviour. I don’t like to hear you talking such rubbish. I’ve always thought you were remarkably sane, coming from a household like that. Amazingly sane. Don’t start cracking up now, for God’s sake, or what will the rest of us have to look forward to? I was always impressed by the way you and Shirley kept your heads screwed on . . . ’

  His voice trails away, as he realizes what he has said.

  ‘Yes, there you are,’ says Liz. ‘That’s what I mean. Shirley’s lost her head. It seems. Me next, perhaps?’

  ‘No, no,’ says Charles, bracingly. ‘Me next. I’m the next in line, not you. You can stay sane, to pick up the pieces.’

  Liz smiles, sighs, shakes her head, and begins to move, as though to rise to make coffee. Charles arrests her, with a hand on her arm.

  ‘You know, Liz,’ he says, astonishingly, ‘I’ve often wondered what really happened to your mother. Did it ever occur to you that something might have happened in her life before she married your father?’

  Liz’s eyes widen.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, some early sexual trauma, some escapade. Some seduction. I mean, it’s odd that she was so utterly without a history. She must have been concealing something.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Liz. ‘But I’d assumed it was him. Our father.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Charles. ‘I sometimes think there was more to it than that.’

  ‘What on earth makes you think that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Something she said. Once. Ages ago.’

  ‘Really, Charles.’ Liz tries to summon up the light-grey questioning eyes of Clive Enderby. She laughs. ‘A mystery. You may be right. A different kind of mystery. Yes, that’s quite possible.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Charles, backtracking. ‘There’s no point in looking into these things too closely. We might not like what we find.’

  ‘You are ill placed to take that line,’ says Liz.

  ‘Well, yes,’ says Charles.

  ‘You know,’ says Liz, ‘I keep thinking about my friend Stephen Cox. Did you ever meet Stephen? I can’t remember. You did? He went off to Cambodia, you know. And nobody knows what he’s up to. He used to send postcards, but now he doesn’t write. There’s no news. Do you think he’s dead?’ She laughs again, miserably. ‘Maybe when you’re tired of looking for Dirk, you could go and look for Stephen. He was a good friend, Stephen.’

  ‘What made him go off to Cambodia in the first place?’

  ‘Oh, I d
on’t know. Curiosity, he said. He was a traveller by nature. A political traveller. He said he was going to write a play about Pol Pot. But he’s been gone nearly two years now. It can’t take two years to research a play, can it?’

  She falls silent, muses. ‘The fatal curiosity. That’s what he said it was. I think it’s the title of something, but I can’t remember what. It’s a good title, isn’t it?’

  ‘He went to see what had happened?’

  Liz shrugs her shoulders, plays with a crumb of bread, repeats the phrase. ‘The fatal curiosity. Yes. That’s the phrase he used. Perhaps it will be the title of his play. Or his novel. Or his memoirs. Or whatever is left. If anything is left.’

  ‘But why Cambodia?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think he wanted to see if the atrocity stories were true. To see for himself.’ Liz looks at Charles. ‘You should understand. Isn’t that why you are off, yourself?’

  Stephen Cox is still alive, although none of the characters in this novel know it. Liz, in bed, having said goodbye to Charles, thinks of him, and of their last meeting. They had dined together, here, in this house, and had discussed truth, facts and the nature of curiosity. Maybe, Stephen had said, there is no history. Nobody but God can record how many died. And as there is no God, there is no history.

  Liz lies in bed, wondering if it is right to try to unravel mysteries, whether it is right to try to count the unnumbered dead.

  Stephen had been interested in Pol Pot because he represented the apotheosis of the demented intellectual. As Saloth Sar he had studied at the Sorbonne, and failed his finals. Or so Stephen said. Stephen said that Pol Pot’s wife, who was also Ieng Sary’s sister, had been the first Khmer woman to obtain the baccalaureat, and that some other woman in the group had studied English literature at the Sorbonne. Imagine, Stephen had said. Imagine them, discussing The Mill on the Floss. Or Cranford. Or even Macbeth, Liz had said. But neither he nor Liz had been able to imagine. And that was why he had departed.

  Charles Headleand has got as far as the Gatwick Hilton. He is sitting on a king-size bed, by himself, in his maroon cotton pyjamas and his grey towelling dressing-gown, playing with the remote control of his television. He summons up arcane messages, for he is a wizard with such machines, and they will tell him matters which they divulge only to the elect. He is now informed that Obolensky and Trubetskoy are playing chess in Bratislava, that a dam has burst in the Upper Volta, that an Iron Age burial has been excavated near Bristol. He calculates (with the aid of another little machine from his pocket) that on the day’s trading in the Stock Exchange he has lost on his shares in Britvest and gained on his shares in Comicot. He learns that the French poet René Longuenesse has died aged seventy-two in Toulouse, and that the exhibition of the works of Simon Blessed now in Northam is to be shown in Manchester later in the year.

  He is drinking a miniature whisky from the drink dispensing machine in the bathroom. It is his second. He has chickened out of saying goodbye to Carla. He cannot face Carla. His evening with Liz has undone the spell of Carla. He knows now that Liz is right, that Dirk Davis is dead. Charles is feeling unwell. He hates travelling. He is still brooding on the bare parting words of his eldest son Jonathan, who had said, over the phone from his yuppy Suffolk cottage, ‘Well, Dad, don’t expect the kind of coverage they gave Terry Waite, will you? You’re not in the Archbishop’s envoy league yet, you know.’ Aaron had been more sympathetic, and had asked his father to send him a postcard. Alan had sounded quite upset, and had gone so far as to say, ‘Don’t get yourself killed, Dad, will you?’ The girls, Liz’s girls, his girls, had been as heartless as Jonathan, though in less media-conscious style. They had implied they thought he was irresponsible.

  And maybe I am, thought Charles, sitting heavily on his bed. He flicked up a few flight departures on the screen: Ulan Bator, Kathmandu, Madrid, Dalaman. Where the hell was Dalaman? A holiday place, not a news place, or he’d have heard of it. His own flight took off at six in the morning. Charles hated flying. He hated the whole business—the queues, the claustrophobia, the take-off, the sound of the wheels retracting, the bullying music, the seat belts, the staff’s psychotic switching from servility to contemptuous indifference. It was bad enough, setting off to somewhere reasonable, like Paris or New York or Los Angeles. But Baldai—no, crazy.

  Charles pottered into the bathroom and prised another whisky out of its slot. He was getting drunk, waiting for a room-service order of cheeseburger and French fries and beer. This isn’t the kind of food he likes, but it’s the kind of food he eats in airport hotels. If he’d brought Carla with him for a farewell dinner, they could have eaten downstairs in the restaurant and had a proper meal with real meat and wine. He knew Carla had wanted to make a big deal of his departure, a publicity stunt, with cameras and the press. He’d slipped away, without telling her quite when. Is this a bad omen? It occurs to Charles that he needn’t go at all. He could just sit here for a week. Lying low. And return home, quietly, saying ‘mission accomplished’.

  The cheeseburger arrives. He tips the waiter and sits down on the bed again to munch. He watches a bit of an American New York Jewish comedy, a few minutes of a black-and-white left-wing heroic peasant film set in Turkey, a soccer goal, and a nature programme about the wildlife of the River Barle on Exmoor. The camera work of this last section is excellent. The water flows, the fish waver in the stream, and a fisherman in dark green who might or might not be Michael Hordern or Ted Hughes stands thigh-deep in the distance. We see lyrical examinations of moss and fern and lichen, and hear a woman’s voice speak knowledgeably of undisturbed woodland. The camera dwells lovingly on a magnified close-up of a tree trunk, at the strange calligraphy of nature and time, then pulls back to show the whole great ancient oak by the running water, encrusted, fringed, dripping with creepers, sprouting exotic ferns like orchids from its generous branches. It is stag-crested, but will live for many years more, and it is host to a multitude of life, the woman explains. The colours of ferns and lichens and mosses astonish with their richness, their clear and subtle profundity: gamboge, ochre, deep rust red, silver grey, velvet orange, luminous green, dark olive, emerald, goblin scarlet. The camera moves to a bird, a dipper, standing on a stone and flirting its wings, then pans downstream to the packhorse bridge of Tarr Steps, which strides across the Barle with broad crooked feet like a prehistoric reptile’s. Everything is composed by time and man and nature into a knot, a vortex, a pact of harmony.

  ‘Charles switches off the sound, and superimposes upon the picture some instant Global News. Over the flowing river appear newly calculated statistics of crime and violence in the inner cities, and predictable telespeak protestations of imminent action from the Home Secretary. Charles watches this combination with satisfaction. It is artistic. He has made it. It occurs to Charles that we do not really need a Home Secretary any more: we could just programme a machine to issue statements, and another machine to issue equally predictable Opposition statements.

  The river is subtle, supple, infinitely varied. No two days in time, no two minutes in time of its long, long history have ever been, will ever be repeated. Its patterns flicker, alter, flow, and each moment is unique.

  Charles drinks his beer, finishes his cold French fries, belches, gets himself another whisky to settle his stomach. The evening wears on. The walls of the room are pastel, the bed is pastel quilted, the prints are bland. A mild, repetitive geometry prevails.

  Charles can no longer pay attention to one source of information at a time. He is Modern Man, programmed to take in several story lines, several plots at once. He cannot quite unravel them, but he cannot do without the conflicting impulses, the disparate stimuli. Perhaps he hopes the alcohol will simplify them, will stick them together and fuse them all into one consecutive narrative. The narrative of his own life, of his place in the history and geography of the world.

  By one in the morning he has had enough of the machinery and of the reassuring decor, and is forced to contemp
late his fate. Muslim extremists, the Koran, hostages, armaments. He knows fuck all about it.

  All the programmes he’s seen, all the reports he’s read, have explained nothing. They are all biased, inevitably misinformed. How can one know what’s going on in the mind of another culture? Perhaps his contact, the abandoned young diplomat Nigel Bicester, will explain Baldai to him. Perhaps not.

  Charles prepares for bed, stumbling around a little in the unfamiliar room, barking his shins on unfamiliar corners. He settles, then reaches into the drawer of his bedside table for the Gideon Bible. Yes, it is there. Charles has resolved, once more, to play the sortes Vergilianae. They had done him proud last time. He shuts his eyes, lets the page fall open, and stabs. He does not cheat, although he hopes that if any travellers have ever before picked up this book, they will have given it a merciful bias towards the New Testament.

  And it appears that they have. Fate, Chance or Custom has chosen him a fine text. Charles stares at it in wonder. Mark 8: 34, 35. ‘Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.’

  These words had been covered by his broad stab of his middle finger. But Charles reads on. Legitimately, he considers.

  For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

  Or what shall a man give, in exchange for his soul?

  Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.