A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘What is it that attracts you to it?’ asked Miss Fawcett, sipping her pale tea.

  And Alix had spoken of equality, of sharing, or her dislike of divisions of wealth and class. Her ideas were muddled, halfbaked, she had no hope of defending them, she was acutely uncomfortable during this interrogation, for Miss Fawcett was a historian, she knew about the Soviet Union and the Second World War and the Treaty of Yalta and the show trials of the thirties and the death of Trotsky. She knew the god that failed. Alix knew next to nothing about any of this.

  ‘Alix,’ said Miss Fawcett, ‘you speak of equality. But do you think that equality can be achieved by economic means, by redistribution, by taking from the rich and giving to the poor?’

  ‘Well, yes, sort of,’ said Alix.

  ‘And are we born equal? Are we born to expect equality? Have we any natural right to equality?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Alix, stubbornly.

  ‘There is only one sense in which we are equal,’ said Miss Fawcett.

  ‘I know what you are trying to get me to say,’ said Alix. ‘That we are all equal in the eyes of God.’

  Miss Fawcett nodded.

  ‘But I’m afraid that doesn’t really mean anything to me,’ said Alix. Apologetically, not aggressively. ‘I can’t quite see what it means.’

  But even as she said this, she could feel emanating from the dim bunched thin knitted figure of Miss Fawcett a wave of illumination, or conviction, that made the whole room surge and heave and flutter with light—or was it merely a distant ray of sun breaking through the high window, the high blind window?

  ‘Alix,’ said Miss Fawcett, ‘we are all equal in the eyes of God because we are all loved by God. And our task on this earth is to emulate that love, by loving all. And if we achieve this, we achieve freedom, equality, brotherhood, sisterhood. Love is the answer. The highest love.’

  Alix was deeply struck by this. It made good sense to her.

  ‘But Miss Fawcett,’ she said, ‘how can you love everyone? Do you love everyone?’ Her temerity amazed her, but Miss Fawcett was not amazed.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I try. I fail, but I try. You see, in my position’—and she paused, deliberately, and looked around her small room, at her sparse possessions—‘it is easy to try.’ Alix sat on the edge of her semi-hard institution chair, rigid with attention. Miss Fawcett was about to offer the key to the universe. ‘Yes,’ Miss Fawcett continued, ‘for me, I make myself try. And occasionally, I succeed. And then you are all irradiated. All equally.’

  She smiled serenely, severely.

  ‘All?’ Alix insisted.

  ‘Yes, all.’ Miss Fawcett sighed. ‘You see, Alix, at my age, in my position—I see people come and go, you young people, you arrive at the age of eleven, twelve, thirteen, and pass through this school, and then on into the world, and another class comes, another year . . . why should I discriminate? Your faces are not individual faces, you are not girls and boys to me, as you are to yourselves, you are manifestations, waves, waves upon waves . . . I see the waves break on the shore. All equal, all equally. Yes,’ Miss Fawcett smiled, forbiddingly, privately, mystically, ‘I love all equally.’

  Alix was silenced. Cautiously, she put her cup and saucer down in the hearth, on the crazed green tiles.

  ‘My love, you see,’ said Miss Fawcett, patiently, ‘like the love of God, can make amends. If I am able to love the plain as well as the beautiful, the stupid as well as the clever, the mean as well as the good. It is love that redeems.’

  Little motes of dust turned in the shaft of sunlight.

  ‘So,’ said Miss Fawcett, with an air of inexorable logic, ‘you see that communism is not the answer. Love is the answer.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alix. ‘I see.’

  ‘I don’t suppose for a moment that you do see,’ said Miss Fawcett, a little more briskly, ‘you are far too young. But I thought I ought to speak to you just the same?’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Fawcett,’ said Alix, politely.

  ‘You may go back to prep now,’ said Miss Fawcett.

  Alix rose to her feet and stood there for a moment, looking down at her scuffed brown sandals, her grey knee socks. She wanted to ask if Miss Fawcett needed to be loved by anyone else, or if she was content to do all the loving herself, but the question seemed impertinent—and anyway, she worked the answer out for herself as she slopped her way down the shallow stone stairs. Silly question, the answer was obvious, of course Miss Fawcett didn’t need anyone to love her, because God loved her. And it was God’s love of her that made her able to love everybody else, everybody in the world, equally, Alix Bowen, Tim Bowlby, Betty Sykes, Pinky Rowson, Kate Josephs, Joseph Stalin, Arthur Koestler, the lot, all of them, equally, all . . .

  Alix, aged fifteen, puzzled at the way a system can provide its own answers, none of which need have any relation at all to any outside system, none of which could ever be checked. So religion had survived, so ideologies survived, in blatant defiance of how things are. Shuffling, then skipping, then running down a corridor (Don’t run, Bowen, echoing vainly after her) and out, and across the autumnal lawn and down the conker avenue and home . . . and now, in her fifties, on her way to prison, Miss Fawcett (who had died the year before as sparsely as she had lived, in an old people’s home) rose again to confront Alix Bowen, with that riddle, that old chestnut, of universal love. L’amor, che muove il sol e l’altre stelle . . . Was it because of Miss Fawcett that she felt compelled to try to love Paul Whitmore? To make him lovable? To make him lovable?

  Equal in the eyes of God.

  Could Miss Fawcett have loved Paul? Abstractly, as a drop in a wave in the human ocean? As human stuff, despite all, as human matter?

  Human matter. This week Alix had read in the paper of a delegation of women from a group of Pacific islands who were presenting a protest to the United Nations on the subject of radiation. They had given birth, they claimed, to monstrous deformities, to babies without heads, to babies with two heads, to babies like monkeys, to full-term lumps of human matter that looked like bunches of grapes.

  Could one love a bunch of grapes? Alix shuddered. What will she say to Paul about Angela? She will await inspiration.

  This week, Alix had made an experiment. She had been to have her hair done. For Alix, this was an event, an occasion, and it had not been vanity that inspired her, but curiosity. She had chosen a cheap hairdresser, on the Coalbright Road, in that long dreary ridge which houses a muddle of small neighbourhood shops, most of them bearing marks of doom. The more prosperous are not ethnic. The salon selected by Alix was not horrifyingly dismal—she was not prepared to martyr herself—but it was a little sad. A non-ethnic Monsieur Raoul presided, but not very visibly. He lurked in a back room. Alix allowed her hair to be washed, minimally trimmed, and dried by a nice girl with MANDY embroidered on the breast pocket of her pink overall. Mandy, confronted by Alix’s fierce grey mane, suggested highlights, lowlights, conditioner. ‘What kind of conditioner do you use, madame?’ she inquired, kindly. ‘I can tell it’s not doing you any kind of good.’ Alix did not like to admit that she did not use any conditioner.

  She sat there, trying to reply to Mandy’s small talk, while breathing in the salon atmosphere, while trying to imagine herself a small boy, twenty years ago. Curls of hair lay on the floor, old women sat around under old-fashioned dryers, Busy Lizzies and geraniums wilted on a windowsill, and old women’s down-market magazines lay in a crumpled heap. Perhaps the Whitmore salon had been smarter than this?

  And the smell. Had it smelled like this? It was the smell that seemed most pertinent. A hot, scorching, chemical smell. Poisonous, dangerous. Sickly sweet, yet acrid at the same time. The smell of deceit, of concealing, of repression. Layers on layers of smell. Alix sat back while the perfumed Mandy puffed hot air at her, and breathed it all in, hot air, perfume, poison and all. Yes, this could easily drive one mad. If lead fumes can poison one, then so could this. Hadn’t Stephen Cox once thought he
was going mad, when in the old days he lived over a dry cleaner’s?

  If I were in a detective story, thought Alix, as she pulled up outside Porston, I’d try to prove brain damage from hair lacquer. As a defence.

  She was half serious.

  She had brought Paul a bunch of grapes, some chocolate, and another book. Gates clanged behind her, keys turned.

  Paul was waiting for her, at his table.

  ‘You look different,’ he said, accusingly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had my hair done. It’s not very different, is it?’

  She had not expected him to be so observant. Would he guess why she had been to the hairdresser? That it had been, indeed, for him? She wondered what to say to him about Angela, as he described to her the disruption caused in the prison by the introduction of a new voluntary AIDS test. Very few had volunteered, and one who had and had been found positive was going through hell as a result. Paul thought this was not fair. Paul had volunteered, had been found negative. Or so he said.

  The hour limped along. Time was running out, and she had not mentioned his mother. Neither had he. She found herself unable to refer to Angela. She hadn’t yet told him that she had seen either of his parents. Of course, having seen them, she saw him differently. Could he tell that she had seen them, as he could tell that she had had her hair done?

  They talked of Ian Kettle and his television series. Alix divulged that Ian and Fanny Kettle had invited her to a party. She often said things to Paul that she did not mean to say, simply to make conversation. Paul complained about the difficulties of signing on for parts of the education programme.

  They wouldn’t let him do archaeology and ancient history, he said, they couldn’t get a tutor. He was thinking of pursuing his other interest, botany, instead. Alix spoke of the Open University. She would ask Brian about its courses, she said. And then Paul said, suddenly, ‘I had a letter from my Dad. He said you’d been to see him.’

  Alix felt herself, unaccountably, blushing. Her face burned. She put one hand up to touch it, to cover it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She should have told him at once, should have owned up.

  ‘He said you were going to see my mother.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Alix. ‘I’m going to try.’

  The lie was out, now she would have to stand by it.

  ‘My father sent me his love,’ said Paul.

  Alix felt the tears stand up in the rims of her eyes. She swallowed hard.

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘He didn’t have much to say. But he ended it with love, God bless.’

  This is ridiculous, thought Alix. She was deeply moved. She sniffed. Her nose prickled.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ said Paul.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Alix. The love of God. The indiscriminate love of God.

  ‘It’s a funny town, Toxetter,’ she ventured, to fill in the silence. The moment had passed, the angel had flown. ‘Yes, it’s a dump,’ said Paul Whitmore.

  Charles Headleand and Nigel Bicester are sitting in the kitchen of the abandoned British Embassy in Baldai trying to tune in to the World Service of the BBC. Charles shakes his head. ‘I don’t get it,’ he says. ‘Could they be jamming the frequency?’

  ‘Easily,’ says Nigel, relieved that Charles has also failed to get the programme. ‘In fact, probably.’

  Charles switches off the strange, high-pitched whistle, and stirs another spoonful of sugar into his instant coffee.

  ‘Christ, what a God-forsaken hole,’ he says.

  The embassy is not what he had expected. It is not smart. It is a dump. The old news photographs of the wall over which the video of the death of Dirk Davis had been thrown had made it look grander than it is. It is nothing like as smart, as his apartment in New York, or as the house in Harley Street. Her Majesty’s diplomats clearly do not live in the splendour to which they were once accustomed. Downhill all the way.

  Charles is tired and irritable. He wants a drink, but there isn’t anything to drink. This is a mad country. Baldai airport had been walled with liquor, jewelled marble halls of Duty Free had extended in every direction, an Aladdin’s cave of booze, a mirage in the desert sands. But here, Bicester tells him, there’s not a drop to be had.

  ‘You must be going crazy out here,’ says Charles, as a compliment, to young Bicester. ‘However do you keep yourself occupied?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not so bad,’ says Nigel Bicester. He is a pleasant, blond young man, public school, well spoken, deferential. ‘I’m learning Arabic, it passes the time. And I have my music. And there are one or two chaps I see from time to time. Socially.’

  ‘Brits, you mean?’

  ‘Well, there’s one Englishman, and a Scot. And a Canadian.’

  ‘What are they doing out here?’

  ‘Two of them are engineers. The Englishman’s a writer. He teaches English. Odd sort of fellow, but he passes the time. He used to be out here with the British Council, and when they withdrew their presence he stayed on and privatized himself. He’s gone a bit native.’

  ‘What does he write?’

  Bicester looked vague.

  ‘I’m not quite clear. I think he said it was a prose epic.’

  Charles got up, restlessly, and began to walk up and down the little kitchen, with its mementoes of England—jars of Nescafé, of Cooper’s marmalade, of Marmite. Typhoo tea bags, Marvel milk powder.

  ‘Ugly building, this,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? Sixties Oriental Brutalism. I particularly dislike those tiles. If I do go mad, it will be the fault of those tiles.’

  Charles smiles appreciatively at the offending floor with its crude geometry of cruel blue and green and black.

  ‘And I’m not too keen on the light fittings either,’ adds Bicester.

  ‘No,’ says Charles. ‘Bit like a dentist’s, aren’t they?’

  Nigel Bicester is pleased to have Charles Headleand as his guest. As Charles has surmised, life in Baldai is dull. It is a mixture of dullness and fear and responsibility for things Nigel does not understand. Like the electricity generator. His departing superior had lectured him passionately about the generator, but Nigel knows he did not grasp the point.

  Nigel hopes Charles will be a practical man. Although he had failed to get the World Service, he had showed impressive command of the fax and telex machinery, and had already sent messages buzzing round the globe. Although Nigel believes Dirk Davis is dead, he is hoping Charles will not establish this too easily. He wants him to hang around for a week or two. Maybe Charles plays chess. Nigel is bored with music and Arabic and his shabby prose writer.

  So far, Charles has made no progress in his pursuit of Dirk Davis. He knows by now that he is on a wild goose chase, and that there is no point at all in trying to establish contact with those who claimed to have executed him. He has meetings arranged for the next day, with the doctor who is said to have certified the death, and with a dubious lawyer. He has already decided inwardly that he will accept whatever story they tell him. This may be cowardly, it may be undignified, but it is what he will do. Unless their accounts seem very suspicious. He hopes they will not. He hopes that by now they will have got their act together, even if they are not telling him the truth.

  He does not like it in Baldai. There is nothing to see in the town but modern buildings of curious Texan structure, and a few palm trees that for all he knows may be made of plastic. Wide roads lead nowhere. The light is harsh. He cannot get the World Service, and Baldai TV, as he had feared, consists of long political and religious discourses in a foreign tongue, interspersed with Western commercials for soft drinks and soap and photocopiers. At one point he feels a small sense of triumph as he finds a radio reading from the Koran in English: it seems like an old friend, and the passage chosen is more inspiring than most of those he managed to find on his own account. It enjoins men to honour their mothers who bore them with pain and reared them from helplessness, it speaks of the limitless knowledge of Allah, of his power to bri
ng all things to light from their hidden places, even those things as small as grains of mustard seed. It tells Charles that if all the trees on the earth were pens, and the sea, with seven more seas to replenish it, were ink, the writing of the words of Allah would never be finished. Allah created you as one soul, and as one soul he will bring you back to life. Charles listens, with interest. At whom is it aimed, this English rendering? There are no American tourists in Baldai.

  The grain of mustard seed intrigues him. There are grains of mustard seed in biblical parables, he dimly recalls. He gets his stolen Gideon Bible out of his suitcase and tries to find them, but it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. A biblical Concordance would be useful, he thinks, but the embassy library does not rise to one. It had a selection of Wilbur Smith and James Clavell, but no Scholarly apparatus to speak of, apart from a Short English Dictionary and a Guide to the Birds of the Middle East.

  He is reduced to comparing the Koran’s account of Joseph’s dream with the Bible’s. He is proud of himself for managing to find both.

  As he fiddles with the knobs of the machine, and rummages through sacred texts, he finds his mind wandering to and wondering at the richness and variety of British television, and, more particularly, to the image of the old oak tree by the River Barle. Hundreds of years old, and bald, blasted, stag-crested; but alive, robust, deep-rooted, a grand old man, sire of a million acorns. Charles identifies with this oak. He thinks of his wives, and of his five children. He has not done too badly. He has done badly, but not too badly. He has sinned, but he has survived. The storms have raged about him, but he has weathered them. And the children should sing in his branches. Jonathan, Aaron, Alan, Sally and Stella. Is not his place with them, instead of here, chasing the ghosts of the dead?

  Fanny’s party is drawing near. It will be attended by as varied a gathering as Northam can afford, and by one or two uninvited guests, and the Dark Stranger. Susie Enderby has already bought some new pink beads to complement her new grey-pink silk dress. She does not yet know that Fanny Kettle is preparing a grey-pink drink, a Pharsalian Pink drink, but when she sees it she will perforce divine some charmed harmony in the match. The beads are mock-pearl, a three-string choker with a golden clasp, quite expensive for costume jewellery. She has shown them to Clive, a trifle guiltily, and has even gone so far as to show him the receipt from Lovell & Harris: £36.80.