A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  She does not know about the pink drink, but she does know that Fanny has invited Blake Leith, as it were ‘for’ Susie. Fanny goes on and on, these days, about Blake Leith. The very name has become incantatory. Fanny is pushing Susie into the arms of Blake Leith. Why? As a whim, for fun, as a kindness? Susie does not know and cannot tell. Blake Leith is a ridiculous name, a seducer’s name, a co-respondent’s name, but Blake Leith, glimpsed once and briefly introduced as he was leaving and Susie was arriving at the Kettle household, had not looked ridiculous. Although he had looked like a seducer and a co-respondent. A tall, thin, shambling, greying figure, a casual villain in grey cord trousers and an old patched jacket. A journalist turned property developer, says Fanny. A wealthy man.

  Alix Bowen has also bought a new dress for Fanny’s party. Reluctantly, it is true, and of necessity. Her old blue ethnic party dress has finally perished. It met an honourable fate. She had worn it to dinner one cold night at their new friends’, the Bells of the university English department, and had ruined it by helpfully clambering up into the loft to try to unblock a frozen pipe with a hair dryer. She had succeeded with the pipe, as various gurglings in the loft and cries of delight in the bathroom below testified, and had descended the stepladder dirty, triumphant and ripped. ‘I told you it would work!’ she was able to boast, as she dusted herself down, amidst the admiration of Brian, Karen, Tim and another couple whose names Alix had never quite caught. ‘I learned that in the big freeze of ‘62. Or was it ‘63?’ Brian said that Alix was a genius with plumbing. ‘I understand plumbing,’ said Alix, settling herself down, the queen of the hour, to a brandy and soda. ‘There’s nothing mysterious or electrical about plumbing, plumbing’s just like a human body, really. Intestines and blockages. It gets cold, it gets hot, it gets air in it. It’s not like cars. I don’t understand cars. Do I, Brian?’ And they had discussed houses and cars, and whether houses were female and cars male, and Alix had remembered little Nicholas her son in that bitter bitter winter, a little boy with measles, hot and feverish, and in the end no water at all in the house despite her coaxing, for the pipes in the street had frozen solid, and she had had to queue at the water lorry with a plastic bucket . . .

  She had treated herself to a new dress, a replacement dress, a new blue ethnic dress. While selecting it, she was not aware that she was repeating herself, imitating herself. She thought she was freely choosing, from an open mind, from the open rails, from a multiplicity of choice. It was only when she got it home, away from all the other dresses, that she began to see how familiar it was, how much it resembled the faithful faded tattered garment now bundled in a plastic bag in the bottom of a wardrobe. Oh well, never mind, she said to Brian, at least it shows I’m consistent. I like what I like. And why not?

  Clive Enderby, you will not be surprised to hear, has not given a thought to what he will wear to Fanny Kettle’s party. His mind is full of other things. Much of it is occupied with the affairs of the Hansborough Development Trust and Operation Pegasus and the sale of several acres of derelict land. If old Starbottom finds out what that land is potentially worth, he won’t sell, but if he doesn’t sell, it will continue to be worth nothing. Clive Enderby is still convinced that he can turn Hansborough Valley Road into Silicon Valley and tempt some real lively new businesses up here from the south. There is a lot of government money about to be made available, come the next election, when something surely will have to be seen to be done about inner-city blight and the decline of the manufacturing industries and the north—south rift. Clive Enderby and Hansborough Chamber of Commerce had got their maps and glossy brochures ready, displaying the charms and conveniences of the district. Clive has written some brilliant copy which has convinced even himself that Hansborough is the strategic centre of the new Britain. But he has heard rumours that Northam Council has rival plans to turn the Valley into the largest Shopping Mall and Funfare in Europe. Delegations have been sent off at the taxpayers’ expense to admire shopping malls in Alberta and Texas and Florida and New South Wales. People speak of dolphins and cascades and giant animated polar bears and alligators lurking in palm-fringed grottoes.

  Clive Enderby cannot think that this vision will ever materialize. How can one have a Shopping Mall and a Funfare when people are too poor to shop, too poor to have fun? We need jobs first, then fun. Clive is slightly shocked by the vulgarity of the vision, and cannot think that Perry Blinkhorn, well known as a puritan, can approve of it either. Clive feels slightly priggish about the notion of Britain as a Union Jacked tourist trap for rich Americans, and cannot work out whether or not his suspicions are properly right-wing. He has heard it said that the way ahead is to forget about real employment altogether, to encourage the manufacture of plastic policemen and the sale of candy-floss. Central London, he hears, has already turned into a replica of itself, a spitting image of itself. Is that success, or failure?

  Clive is too much of a northerner, too much of a hard worker himself, he has too much in common with Perry Blinkhorn to want to turn Hansborough Valley Road into a dolphinarium. He sees clean factories, monorails, helicopters, landscaped estates, high salaries, the best of modern architecture, a prosperous revitalized community. Is that such a ridiculous concept? Is that an impossible Utopia?

  Clive is sick of sentimental rubbish about the old days. The old days stank of filth and exploitation and incompetence. Let them sweat in the Pacific Basin, let the Koreans labour round the clock. Yorkshire does not want to go back to that kind of thing. It wants to go forward. Many of the factories that closed over the last few years deserved to go bust. Only last week Clive had been shown round the abandoned works of Cliff Harper by Cliff’s brother Steve. It was enough to make a modern man weep. The mess, the muddle. A leaking roof, heaps of rusting spare parts, a dingy office deep in old invoices, unwashed mugs standing on work benches, green with mould. How could a man be expected to spend a working day in gloom like that? No wonder people prefer the dole. A pile of shavings, a mousetrap with a dead mouse still pinioned. A small dry grey husk of a mouse, in an old-fashioned, wooden mousetrap. Surely, there must be more up-to-date mousetrap models on the market, now, in the 1980s?

  Driving back from Cliff’s works, Clive had stopped his car on the crest of the hill and looked down the valley. That weekend, on the golf course, he had had a vision, a revelation. As he swung to the ninth green (rather brilliantly, for him) on a crisp spring morning, he had suddenly seen the answer to the scale of dereliction. The answer was grass. It was so simple, like all good solutions. Of course one could not rebuild all these abandoned acres, modern industry did not need such spaces, but the sight of them crumbling and decaying was a deterrent. So—grass them over. Why not? Grass over what you don’t need, and rebuild the rest. Landscape it, and rebuild. A sea of green. It would cost money, but not all that much money. It had been tried, once, in the optimistic sixties—hadn’t Stoke-on-Trent grassed over a few slag heaps, to the irritation of the locals, and made an industrial park in the centre of the conurbation?

  Why had they stopped the programme?

  Lack of money, lack of faith. Money is faith. Faith is money. Clive stared at the grey-brown-black acres, and willed them green. Grass. Astroturf. Clive saw an army of workers, laying grass. He determined to look into the economics of grass. Real grass, plastic grass, forced grass, false grass. Invest in grass. Grass over Cliff Harper, let Cliff Harper lie.

  Shirley sits in Liz’s drawing-room in St John’s Wood and strokes the tabby cat. Now she is back in England, the craziness of her own behaviour begins to alarm her a little. Not much, or not yet much, but a little. Luckily, Liz is making herself useful for once by coming up with some explanatory phrases—‘hysterical fugue’ seems to be the most plausible to Shirley.

  Shirley nods at it, storing it away for future usage. Liz is being calm, practical, reassuring, big-sisterly, but, despite having deliberately, ostentatiously adopted this manner, she cannot resist the odd glint of sheer curiosity. She is, of course,
particularly intrigued by Robert Holland, who had accompanied Shirley to Liz’s house that afternoon and left her there, after refusing an offered cup of tea. She had guessed his appearance quite correctly from his telephone voice: he looked as Esther had told her, almost uncannily okay. So what on earth had he and Shirley been up to? What had they been playing at? How long had they known one another? Dare she ask?

  Shirley shifts, carefully altering her position in her armchair, and smiles a little secret smile. She will stay the night at Liz’s, go to Northam in the morning.

  Liz has done her best to describe what has happened in Shirley’s absence. She has spoken of Bob and Barry and of Celia, she has reported that the inquest on Cliff has been opened, the death certificate issued, but that the body has not yet been buried. ‘People were waiting for you to come home,’ she says, feebly, and falls silent. She watches Shirley. Shirley must indeed, Liz considers, be in some kind of deep shock. What will happen when she emerges? Shirley is very thin, but a faint hectic flush lightens her pallor. She looks very attractive. Her eyes are dark, sunken, huge. Liz is fascinated by this new, unknown Shirley.

  She is about to speak. Liz listens, intently. Shirley has all her attention.

  ‘I’ve got this terrible boil on my bum,’ says Shirley, in a kind of mock-plaintive tone. And smiles.

  Liz is dumbfounded. ‘What?’ she says, playing for time.

  ‘A boil on my bum,’ explains Shirley, patiently, sweetly. ‘You know. A boil. Bloody painful. Are you allowed to prescribe me anything for it? Or is that against the rules?’

  ‘Oh, never mind the rules,’ says Liz, rallying. ‘I’ve got some antibiotics in the cabinet, you can have some.’

  Surely Shirley will not ask her to look at the boil? The thought of looking at Shirley’s bottom makes Liz feel quite faint. Liz shuts her eyes, momentarily. She opens them, the new Shirley is still sitting there, smiling enigmatically.

  ‘I suppose you’re wondering where I met Robert,’ says the new Shirley. ‘Well, it wasn’t in Northam, you can be sure of that. I picked him up on the ferry. Or he picked me up. It comes to the same thing, I suppose. He’s rather nice, don’t you think?’

  Liz wonders whether to pinch herself to see if she is awake.

  ‘Yes,’ she says feebly. Rather nice? Yes, those words did seem to describe her fleeting glimpse of Robert Holland.

  ‘But I don’t know,’ says Shirley, ‘if there’s much future in him.’

  Her voice is a little high and thin, meditative, caressing. Her words float in the large room.

  ‘But then,’ says Shirley, ‘there may be. You never can tell.’

  And she smiles, again, as her shocked, silenced sister staggers out of her chair, mumbles, and trudges off in search of antibiotics.

  Consider Cliff Harper. This narrative has paid him no respect. It has used him as a ploy and a convenience, as a prop and a statistic. His story has not been told. His wife it would seem does not mourn him, his children it would seem do not mourn him, his mother reviles him, his father is too senile to know what has happened to him, and his partner curses his memory. Only his brother Steve and his sister-in-law Dora decently lament him. Or so it would seem.

  This could have been the story of Cliff Harper, but it is not. That story will never be told. There are parts of Cliff Harper’s life that are secret, known to none. Nobody knows them, not wife nor brother nor mother nor father nor children. He will take them to the grave. Already they are cold upon the slab.

  If we could grieve for every sorrow and every life, we would never stop grieving. We would never be able to get up in the morning, we would never be able to feed the cat or water the pot plants. The air would be loud with lamentation. It is better not to know.

  This story could tell you of Cliff’s earliest financial transactions, of the rabbit he sold, and the old bicycle. He had worked on that bicycle, had done it up.

  It could tell you of his difficulties at school. He was weak at maths.

  It could tell you of how he fell in love with Shirley Ablewhite, when she was fifteen years old, and wild, raging with desire and demand beneath her school uniform.

  It could tell you of his fears of never being able to satisfy that desire and that demand. It could tell of the defeat that filled him when Shirley turned away from him in their marriage bed, and sobbed quietly into her pillow, hoping he could not hear. He heard.

  It could tell you of the woman he picked up in the Royal Hotel in Doncaster and of the infection he caught.

  It could tell you of the panic that filled him when the VAT inspector came to look at the accounts, of his resentment of the not-quite-respectful look on his bank manager’s face.

  It could tell you of his alarm when his eldest son Barry grew more and more stroppy, of his fights with Barry, of his shame when Barry went off to Newcastle and shacked up with a pigtailed Irishman and became a day labourer. It could tell you of his relief when his second son Bob took himself off to Australia, out of reach, out of sight, almost out of mind. It could tell you of his fear of his close-lipped, hard-working daughter Celia, top-of-the-class Celia, whose expensive education had born strange fruit, who hardly spoke to or looked at her lumbering father.

  It could tell you of the woman he picked up in the Three Horseshoes in Manchester.

  It could tell you of his nightmares about his overdraft.

  It could tell you of the pride he felt in the new car he bought in 1983. He was fond of this car. This was the car he died in.

  It could tell you of his support for the Northam Rovers, and of his disappointment that Barry and Bob did not share his interest in soccer. Did he occasionally wonder, could it have been his own fault, for ramming it at them when they were infants, for making them play ball in the park on frosty Sunday mornings, as their little faces turned blue, and their noses ran, and their knees blazed and prickled and chafed, as he would shout at them for missing the ball? This story could not tell you, for it does not know.

  But it could tell you of the woman he picked up in Birmingham, and of the infection he thought he caught from her, and of his fears of what, in these dangerous days, it might prove to be. It could note his conviction that he had sinned, that God had marked him out, that Shirley would be infected. It could tell you of his covert examinations of his own body, of his inability to make himself visit the doctor, of his decision to sleep with Shirley no more.

  It could tell you of his plan to visit, secretly, an expensive clinic in London ‘for a complete check-up’, as so many stressed executives are driven to do, and of his hope that this check-up would reveal that he was not mortally ill. It could tell you of the way in which hope itself assumed a nightmare face, a mocking, high-coloured, painted face, a seducer’s treacherous smile.

  It could tell you of the dull thud in his body as he stared furtively at the tempting glossy brochure for the Corsham Clinic in Harley Street, with its tables of fees and its portraits of white-coated doctors and short-skirted nurses, of bowls of flowers on polished hardwood tables. Fear lurked in those pages, fear and a death sentence. How could he have himself tested, for £150, when a test could only confirm that he was a dying man? (The brochure had slightly misjudged its impact, you might say.)

  Hope and fear grinned at him. In the end he could bear their mockery no longer, and gassed himself, without saying a word to anyone. He gassed himself with carbon monoxide in his garage in one of the nicer and newer suburbs of Northam.

  It could tell you all these things. But you know them all. You may know more about them than this story is able to tell. Maybe you too have stared at glossy brochures, have read entries in medical dictionaries, have woken in the small hours with the knowledge of mortality.

  Meanwhile, Celia reads Tacitus, and dwells on the colourful atrocities of an imperial past. Meanwhile, Barry lays bricks, smokes hash and eats pizza up in Newcastle, and Bob works on an Australian vineyard with a bunch of boring Eyeties, and Shirley and her sister Liz drive up the Ml in Shirley’s re
scued Mini towards the shell of the Harper home. Shirley is worrying about the soft, depressed, depressing, impotent lavatory handle in the downstairs cloakroom. She really should have wired it up before she ran away, she reflects.

  This short story about Cliff could add a postscript, about Barry. Barry Harper has had even more of a bit part than Cliff, but that does not mean that he does not have a whole story of his own, still in the making. Barry, having no access even to the minimal explanations sketched in these paragraphs, blames himself for his father’s death. In his view, if he had not cut up rough and buggered off to Newcastle, his father would still be alive. Barry reproaches himself, painfully, bitterly, pointlessly, and Will so do for years to come. But what else could he have done? He and his father could not live under the same roof, they could not even eat at the same table.

  Liz Headleand sat in Alix’s spare room, trying on clothes. She was trying to find something to wear to Fanny Kettle’s party. Alix had bullied her into going. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Alix explained, ‘because of old Beaver,’ and anyway, Alix had continued, Fanny Kettle herself was well worth a visit. ‘She’s the Madame Bovary of Northam,’ Alix had said. ‘Or maybe the Messalina, if rumour speaks true. So you see, you must come.’

  ‘But who will be there?’ Liz had asked.

  ‘Oh, everybody,’ said Alix. ‘Town and gown, dukes and duchesses, rag, tag and bobtail.’

  ‘Dukes and duchesses?’

  ‘Well, not really. Sam says she asked them, but they didn’t say they’d come.’