A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘A vodka base, perhaps,’ mused Fanny. ‘With a little Angostura? Or grenadine? A pale-pink drink would be rather smart, don’t you think? And we could give it a special name. Something exotic, something bewildering. Come on, think of something for me, Tony. Something wild and Celtic. Something primitive and primeval. Come on, you know all that archaeological stuff. Who was the Celtic goddess of parties?’

  ‘I don’t know if they had one,’ said Tony, amused despite himself by his mother’s frivolous misapplications of his father’s mysteries: Fanny was so outrageous, what could one do but laugh and admire? ‘There was a goddess of plenty,’ he proffered. ‘Would she do? Rosmerta, she was called.’

  ‘Rosmerta.’ Fanny tried out the name. ‘Rosmerta. Rosmerta. No, I don’t think she would do at all. Horrid word. A hurty smurty dirty word. But we’re on the right lines. Who else is there?’

  Tony ran through what he could recall of the Celtic pantheon: there was a Brigit, the goddess of the Brigantes? Or Sulis Minerva, from Bath? These Fanny rejected as wholly unfestive. Tony couldn’t think of any more, so went off in search of Graham Webster’s The British Celts and Their Gods under Rome, and started thumbing through the index. Fanny didn’t like the sound of any of the Celtic deities. The great Queen Rigatona sounded too like a kind of pasta, she said, and horse goddess Epona sounded bony and snooty. The glossary wasn’t much help either. It listed only twenty-eight Celtic words, and none of them would do: derna, deva, dubo, lem, leuca, maglis, matis . . .

  ‘Stop, stop,’ cried Fanny, ‘what an ugly language, those won’t do at all. Look up in the index for anything beginning with p. It’s to be a pink drink, so something beginning with p would do.’

  Patiently, Tony turned to the index. ‘Pagan, paleolithic, Pales, pantheon,’ he read. ‘Hmm, pagan’s not bad, Pagan Pink. Not bad.’

  ‘But read on,’ she urged him, ‘read on.’

  ‘Phallus,’ he read, obligingly. ‘Pharsalia.’

  ‘That’s it!’ she cried. ‘Pharsalian! Pharsalian Pink! Brilliant! I can just see it, a beautiful crystal bowl of Pharsalian Pink. A beautiful subtle misty pinky-bluey-smoky pink!’

  Tony pointed out that Pharsalia didn’t, strictly, phonetically, begin with a p. (He did not point out that Fanny’s ideal drink colour strangely resembled that of methylated spirits.)

  ‘Never mind,’ said Fanny. ‘It sounds wonderful. Pharsalian Pink! It’s inspired. Clever boy. What does it mean?’

  ‘I think it’s the name of a poem,’ said Tony, vaguely. His attention had been distracted by the entries for phallus: unobtrusively, furtively turning the pages, he had lit upon an alarming but intriguing drawing of a phallus with wings and legs from a sherd in the Colchester Castle Museum, and another drawing of a very rude frieze in which a pursuing youth spilled his seed upon the ground before reaching his destined maiden. The maiden’s gesture in response to this copious premature ejaculation was ambiguous, but, either way, rude. He concealed the page from Fanny’s gaze. It was not suitable for Fanny’s eyes.

  ‘Pharsalian Pink,’ said Fanny. ‘Yes, that should get them all going, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liz. ‘Yes. Yes, I see. Yes. Of course. Yes. Thank you so much for ringing. Of course, yes, I understand. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Goodbye.’

  Liz put the phone down. She had said she understood, but she did not understand at all. She could not take it all in. She looked down at what she had written on her note-pad. Robert Holland. Institute of English Studies. 188, rue de Vaugirard. 62 bis, rue de Saussure, 15è. A couple of telephone numbers. Robert Holland. Who on earth was Robert Holland? And what was he doing, in Paris, with her sister Shirley? The whole thing was quite impossible, and the most impossible part of it all was that Robert had sounded so normal, so ordinary, so like the kind of person one might know anyway, so like the kind of chap one has known all one’s life. Liz felt dizzy. So Shirley wasn’t lying in a shallow grave, she was hiding in a love nest in Paris. How could this be?

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Shirley. Shirley was lying back on the uncomfortable striped chaise longue with her feet up on a little pillow, sipping an Alka-Seltzer. She had decided she would have to go home and face the music. She was still feeling very odd—better, mentally, but physically she was coming to pieces. Her stomach was upset, she had a strange stinging bloody vaginal discharge, and a painful boil on her left buttock. She had confided some of these problems to Robert, but not all. She was surprised by how little they worried her. She had no intention of going to see a French doctor. She would go home, instead, and see Dr Peckham. And she needed a hot bath. It was impossible to get a hot bath in Robert’s bathroom. She had failed to master the snake-like cantankerous system, and Robert admitted that it was temperamental. She was beginning to yearn for her own well-appointed suburban bathroom. And what about the handle of the downstairs cloakroom lavatory? She hadn’t got round to fixing it, had she? She had a dim idea that the handle of the door had killed Cliff. No, it was time she went home.

  ‘She said everybody had been very worried about you. Of course,’ said Robert.

  Shirley smiled, irresponsibly.

  ‘I bet she wasn’t all that pleased to hear,’ she said. ‘I told you she wouldn’t care, one way or the other.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s quite true,’ said Robert, cautiously. ‘Of course she was relieved to hear you were alive. And well.’

  ‘I’m not well,’ said Shirley, shifting her bottom to ease the pressure on the boil. And she laughed.

  ‘So all you have to do,’ said Robert, ‘is to make your mind up about your car. Whether you want to pick it up on the way or not. Or whether you want to come all the way back with me, tomorrow.’

  ‘I suppose everybody will be very annoyed with me,’ said Shirley. ‘Whatever I do, they’ll be annoyed with me. You’re not annoyed with me, are you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Robert, and leant over and grasped her ankle reassuringly. He held her foot and stroked her toes. ‘Why ever should I be annoyed with you?’

  They smile at one another, a smile of complicity, ease, understanding. They are companions in crime, they have managed to avoid expectation, recrimination, commitment. They live in the present, they avoid tension. For the moment, there seems to be no problem in going back to Northam and a hot bath. Let the police and the lawyers and the coroner and her children and her sister mutter and fret and bluster. Who cares? None of it is important. Shirley stretches, yawns. She is perpetually tired. It is a delightful sensation, this tiredness. Her physical discomforts are delightful. Her body swims in a bloody flux, and Robert Holland companionably caresses her stockinged toes.

  Some hours after receiving the phone call from Robert Holland, Liz received another phone call from Esther Breuer in Bologna. Esther wished to report that two evenings ago she had seen Shirley Harper in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. At the time, she told Liz, she had thought this odd, but not very odd: she had now learned from Alix that Shirley had in theory disappeared, so perhaps Liz ought to know her whereabouts?

  ‘Thanks awfully, Esther,’ said Liz, ‘but in fact I did have a phone call at lunch time today. From the man she’s with. Saying she’s coming home tomorrow. What a very odd affair. You say you actually saw her? Did she see you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I sort of think we pretended not to see one another.

  ‘And in the Musée d’Orsay, you say? What on earth can she have been doing there? She’s never been to an art gallery in her life. Well, hardly ever. Has she turned into a completely new person? If I hadn’t had this phone call from this man, I’d have had to say that I thought you were mistaken. But a man is just as surprising as an art gallery. What did he look like?’

  ‘Quite nice, really,’ said Esther. ‘Sort of middle aged and pleasant. Yes, pleasant. You know. Not a rapist or a murderer. The kind of person one might ask to dinner. If one asked people to dinner—which I don’t.’

  ‘I say,’ said Liz, ‘do you think Cliff comm
itted suicide because he found out about Shirley and this man?’

  ‘I didn’t even know Cliff had committed suicide until Alix told me this morning,’ said Esther.

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly headline news,’ said Liz. ‘How should you have known?’ And then, a little suspiciously, ‘And what was Alix phoning you about, anyway?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much, she wanted me to translate some Italian phrases in a letter of Beaver’s. And then we got chatting, and I told her she hadn’t been able to get me earlier because I’d been in Paris, and then I told her about the Musée and happened to mention I’d seen Shirley . . . ’

  ‘And what did you make of the Musée?’ asks Liz, temporarily distracted. Esther gives her impressions. They chatter on, moving from Moreau to Freud and the Oedipus complex and Vienna and whether or not Hoffmann is right to argue that Freud was wrong to revise his presentation of hysteria. They speak of Paul Whitmore, of Alix’s obsession, of Esther’s long-dead palm, of Paul Whitmore’s curious sympathy for this palm, of what palm trees symbolized, if anything, of Saqui Farooqui’s poem about a palm. ‘Oh Esther,’ says Liz, suddenly depressed, ‘I wish you hadn’t deserted us. With Alix up north and you in Italy, London’s not what it was. And Stephen’s still in Cambodia, and Charles is in Baldai, and all I have is my little tabby cat.’

  ‘And Shirley, on her way, with her mysterious lover,’ says Esther.

  ‘Oh God, don’t remind me of Shirley,’ says Liz. ‘But seriously, Est, are you ever thinking of coming back? It’s not so bad here, you know. Or not for people like us.’

  Esther hesitates. Shall she speak, shall she be silent? Where do her loyalties now lie? She does not know. Is it worth agreeing to marry Robert Oxenholme, just for the fun of shocking Liz out of her wits?

  ‘Why don’t you come and see me, Liz,’ she retaliates. ‘You and Alix, come out and see me. I’m sure you could find a pretext. If you need one. Think about it.’

  ‘All right,’ agrees Liz. As she puts down the phone, she suddenly feels not whimsically but deeply sad, alone and tired and old and sad. What next, she asks herself, and what is the point of what next? It is true that she misses Esther and Alix, and the irregularly regular little suppers that they used to share. She doesn’t feel up to making any new friends. Why bother? She can hardly believe that Shirley has acquired a new man. Liz cannot imagine acquiring or wanting to acquire one. She had been happy, with Esther and Alix, with her growing children and stepchildren, with her share of Charles, and now they have all gone. Liz sits in her familiar armchair, gazing at her little inlaid table, at its fragile burden of scented jonquils in a glass vase, at a heap of unread new novels and a life of Melanie Klein and a book of photo-reportage about the Philippines. Her curiosity is at a low ebb. It occurs to her that not only may she die before she satisfies it, but that she may also lose it before she dies. Curiosity has kept her alive. What if she were to lose it now? She has not the energy to move. She is bored, lifeless. Her mind wanders to Shirley. Ought she to ring Steve and Dora Harper, ought she to try to contact Celia in Oxford, or Barry in Newcastle, or Bob in Australia, ought she to speak to Clive Enderby? She yawns. Paris. Paris and Shirley. The two do not go together. Paris. She remembers a wild weekend there with Charles, years and years ago, nearly thirty years ago, just before Sally was born . . . She nods, her eyes close, she dozes.

  Alix, on her monthly visit to report to Paul Whitmore, thinks of Liz, and of Shirley, who will now be on her way home, and of Esther, and of the nature of curiosity, and of the nature of love. Sexual love, maternal love, sisterly love, friendship. She thinks of Angela Whitmore, and the dreadful dogs. Does Angela ‘love’ those dogs? Does Liz ‘love’ her tabby cat, or does she merely pretend to love her tabby cat? And Paul Whitmore, in Porston Prison, whom does he love, whom can he now love?

  Alix is afraid that Paul Whitmore ‘loves’ her, Alix Bowen. Oh, not particularly, but just because she is there, because she is there and his mother is not. Can she possibly love Paul Whitmore? Is this what is asked of her?

  Alix had received that morning a letter from her friend and admirer, from her husband’s close friend, Otto Werner. A year ‘or two ago she had fancied herself ‘in love’ with Otto, and he had declared himself to be ‘in love’ with her. They had done nothing about it, and Otto had gone off with his children and his wife Caroline to take up a post in Washington. Love, unstimulated, unsustained, had dwindled and faded. Could it be recovered, if Otto were to return and claim her? No, no, that was all over. His letter had been careful, courteous, rueful. He had written of American politics, of the Governor of Massachusetts’s Employment and Training Choices Programme, of Workfare, of Brian’s view that Britain was now a poor colony of the USA, a missile pad, a nuclear dump. He had not written of matters of the heart. He never did, he did not know how to. But he had signed himself ‘Yours for ever, dearest Alix, your Otto’. Well, that would do., Nothing that Brian could not see, nothing that Brian could object to. A road not taken. An open letter.

  Beaver’s love letters were an extraordinary collection. Perversely, he seemed to have kept the most disagreeable, abusive ones—there must surely once have been some more tender notes, somewhere, from someone? Money featured in them frequently. Beaver had been a great borrower, and his women sometimes seemed to want their money back, as well as their hearts and minds. ‘You owe me eleven thousand pounds,’ one of them had written, in firm italic script, ‘and a copy of Paradise Lost, and I think you may have got my translation of the Divine Comedy, to say nothing of four years of my life and Geoffrey’s cashmere scarf.’ Another had complained, more plangently, in stuttering typescript, ‘How could you, H. B., after all I did for you in Birmingham? I really thought you meant to pay it back. Please, please, dear heart, I need that two hundred quid now, surely you could borrow it off Bertha? Or Sonya, if she’s so devoted to you? Two hundred was all I had. My fond heart gave all. Give back to one who loved not wisely but too well. Please, try to get it over by Friday, before Jack gets home.’

  Alix enjoyed reading these old letters, rustling of dead romance and forgotten betrayals. But she was also disturbed by them. How upsetting love affairs were. Why did people so enjoy being miserable? She herself had always preferred (she now could clearly see) safe men, undangerous men. She had not been attracted to the bastards and Beavers and Bohemians of this world. Her first husband Sebastian had been a happy man, cheerful, good-natured optimist, confident, friendly. He never had time to turn into anything worse. He had died too young to rot, to become a rotter. Brian was a good man, a strong man, a man who would never borrow a penny off anyone, a man who would lend his last fiver to a stranger. A man of honour. And Otto too was a good man, an honourable man, who had resisted the temptation of Alix’s blue eyes, who had honourably removed himself from her mature Siren attractions, and taken himself off to the fleshpots of Reaganland. All honourable men. Is there something wrong with me, pondered Alix, that I only get off with honourable men, that only honourable men fancy me? Am I afraid of the bastard streak?

  It’s true that she quite enjoyed it, at a safe remove, in Beaver.

  Love. Eros. Agape. The destroying angel. Angela Whitmore had not loved Paul Whitmore, and as a result he had killed several innocent strangers.

  Alix’s memory flicked, suddenly, to her one-time history teacher, Miss Fawcett. Miss Fawcett had preached love, in a curious and haunting manner, a manner which her pupils had found excessive and ridiculous. Miss Fawcett had—almost—been a figure of fun. She had been a representative eccentric, an eccentric of the kind that was often to be found in private boarding schools and may still, for all Alix knew, linger on there—a fierce, lonely, exalted spinster, whose life seemed to her young charges to exist on the edge of unbearable privation. Although the school was coeducational, and in theory at least espoused the equality and natural communion of the sexes, Miss Fawcett managed to bring to it a strange intensity of chosen virginity, an old-fashioned ardour.

  Her room had be
en like a cell, an anchorite’s cell. It was on the top corridor of School House, where in addition to her other duties she supervised the night-time ramblings of the fifth and sixth form girls. Alix, who was not a boarder, had been invited up there for tea, for a talking-to, a dressing-down, a putting-right. This was when Alix was in the upper fifth, and had taken up the cause of communism, partly to annoy her classmates.

  ‘Sit down, Alix,’ Miss Fawcett had said, nervously, severely.

  And Alix sat, and looked around her, at the tall shiny cream-painted bare walls, at the narrow bed with its maroon woven bedspread and its little folding tartan rug, at the cheap wardrobe with cheap wood beading round its door, at the ill-fitting limp curtains, at the desk-bureau, at the bookcase. Nothing in the room matched, nothing fitted, everything had a temporary, impermanent, rickety look, and the room—carved out, partitioned out of a much larger room—was too high for its floor space, it was high and thin, with a high window, above eye level, through which one could never commune with anything but the sky. No photographs, no ornaments, no personal effects disturbed the room’s austerity.

  Miss Fawcett offered Alix a cup of tea, and a biscuit. She had a gas ring and kettle in the hearth, and a tin of biscuits on the table at her elbow. The biscuit was ceremonial. Alix nibbled it, as slowly as she could, as Miss Fawcett told her that she was distressed to hear Alix defending the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin to her classmates. ‘You’re an intelligent girl, Alix,’ she said, her grey face intent, quizzical, her corkscrew curls bobbing as she nodded in emphasis, an intelligent girl, I’m sure you are just trying out ideas, but these matters are too serious to play with, you know, too serious to make games of.’

  ‘I’m not making games,’ said Alix. ‘I’m interested in communism. I think it’s a good idea.’