A Natural Curiosity

by Margaret Drabble

  She rang the Vietnamese Embassy in London and demanded news of Stephen Cox and asked how to get a visa to visit Democratic Kampuchea. She rang Charles in Baldai and told him to come home at once and accept the Directorship of the RGA, as the Queen herself was pleading for him to do so daily. She bought an extravagant embroidered bedspread of many colours as a wedding present for Ivan Warner and Alicia Barnard. She asked all her children to supper and enthused to them about Marcia for as long as they would listen. She rang up Esther in Bologna to tell her about Marcia, and threatened to visit Esther with Alix in May. She told Alix she needed a holiday, and rang up a travel agency to book tickets. She bought some new lilies and a newt for her fishpond. She astonished everybody, as she herself had been astonished.

  The only person she failed to astonish was, as we have seen, Clive Enderby, who had known part of the Plot all along, but who, at Fanny’s party, had had his eye on the wrong half-sister. Clive at this late stage handed over the long-lost document to Liz, and together they stared at its quaint wording: stamped in faded blue and orange, sealed in dark-red wax, it covenanted to Rita Ablewhite (‘the Annuitant’) from Percy William Latchett de Percy Hestercombe (‘the Grantor’) a monthly sum of sixty-six pounds, six shillings and eightpence, provided that she agreed not to ‘molest or annoy the Grantor or his wife or any of his relatives or friends’, and provided that she continued ‘to live in strict and chaste cohabitation with her husband, Alfred Ablewhite’ at ‘the address here named, of 8 Abercom Avenue, Northam, Yorkshire.’ On Ablewhite’s death, should she remarry, ‘the said monthly sum should be absolutely forfeited and cease to be payable.’

  This is a monstrous document,’ said Liz, as she took in its implications. ‘Do people make this kind of arrangement these days?’

  ‘Not in my practice,’ said Clive Enderby. ‘But I bet old Percy had a few dotted around the countryside, by all accounts.’

  ‘Well, it was bad luck for my poor mother,’ said Liz. ‘Do you think she took it quietly, or do you think she kicked up a fuss?’

  ‘It would seem,’ said Clive, ‘wouldn’t you think, that at some stage, she kicked up quite a fuss?’

  ‘Good for her,’ said Liz, warmly. ‘I hope she gave them all some bad moments. The wife and the relatives and the friends.’

  And she rang up Alix, to try to interest her in this interesting sociological and historical curiosity, but Alix had new worries of her own. The new Liz is rather exhausting, said Alix to Brian, as she put the phone down after one of Liz’s more manic calls.

  Alix herself was doubly preoccupied, with Howard Beaver’s will, and with a poison-pen letter that she took to come from Angela Malkin.

  Beaver’s will was as annoying as he had threatened, and as ambiguous as Alix had feared. As literary executor, Alix was instructed to destroy all unpublished poems and correspondence except such material as should be deemed of legitimate interest to a biographer’, and in reward for her fulfilment of this imprecise obligation she was to inherit the princely proceeds of Howard Beaver’s share of Public Lending Right. Alix knows these proceeds to have amounted (over the few years of P L R’s existence) to an average of some £80 per annum. She is also left with the option of editing Beaver’s Collected Letters, should she so desire, in which case she could have the royalties (and the P L R) on the volume as well as any money she may be able to screw out of a publisher for a contract for this task. The copyright of the letters would, however, remain with the estate. Thus Alix is left in the ridiculous position of being free to bum or publish letters that do not belong to her, some of which are, she suspects, of considerable commercial value. If she bums them, nobody will be any the wiser. If she edits them, she will have a financial life interest in them. She is unable to work out what her moral obligations or her inclinations are. Brian advises her to wait, to let the dust settle. ‘Dust!’ exclaims Alix. ‘Dust! There’s so much dust settled already in that attic that it might as well stay where it is. Who cares about Beaver’s correspondence? I’m sick of the stuff!’

  Angela Malkin’s letter was less ambiguous. It had no signature and no address, but it was posted in Thirsk, and read: ‘Was that you snooping again late Saturday night. If you come near this place again, remember my warning.’

  The message had, of course, the opposite effect. Alix received it as a challenge, a gauntlet. The fact that Angela had thought somebody was snooping around Hartley Court did not surprise her at all: it was the kind of place where one might expect snoopers. In retrospect, Alix had endowed the establishment with a criminal halo. It deserved snoopers. No good was going on there. Angela was clearly nervous that Alix would reveal her association with Paul to the sinister Colonel and his accomplice the Doctor. Alix had a hold over Angela, as this letter bore witness.

  Alix thinks about Beaver and Paul. Beaver is dead now, she has attended his funeral and will attend his memorial service. She has seen him off, and she did not serve him badly, although she failed him at the last moment, when she let Liz take her place in the ambulance. She has a great deal of information about Beaver, she knows more about him than anyone alive, she certainly knows more about him than his fat, pompous, fifty-year-old son Frank, a jeweller from Bradford, or his ex-midwife daughter Lois from Canada. They know nothing of Beaver’s amours, of his friendships with the great, of his working life. They do not seem ever to have read any of his poems. But all her knowledge of Beaver is now on paper. It is all literary. It belongs to the world of books. Beaver was her one living link with this mass of material. Now he has turned into a paper wilderness, a paper labyrinth to which she alone holds the clues. The Third Reader of Lucan was that silent scholar. Death.

  With Paul, the reverse is true. She holds some clues to his history, because he has told her things that he has not told to others. But nothing is on paper. Nothing but two scraps from his father, and now this scrap from his mother, and the spare, sparse, better-punctuated letters she has received from Paul himself. There is no other documentation. This is not a paper case. It is real.

  And, as a real case, it is more of a challenge. Alix in her life has read too many books, has pursued too many paper puzzles, has deciphered and decoded too many texts. The real, enigmatic, studious pallid Paul calls to her from Porston. The evil, ill-read Angela attracts her.

  And so she made her plans to go again to Hartley Court, after Easter, in the last week of April. Again, she did not tell Brian and Sam where she was going. Uncharacteristically, she had kept quiet about her meeting with Angela. She had told nobody, not even Liz. But this time, she left a note on the kitchen-table, for Brian. In a sealed envelope. She expected to be back long before he had a chance to read it. It said: ‘Darling B., I’ve gone to see my murderer’s mother, at Hartley Court, Hartley Bridge, Phone No. H. B 20320. If I never come back, come and collect my whitening bones tomorrow. See you for supper meanwhile. I’ll be back about five. Love and kisses XXX A.’

  She chose ‘five’ as an arbitrary symbol. She expected to be back long before five.

  It was a strange, sultry morning. The sun broke through a mild thin cloud, and the air beat blue. There had been thunder the night before, and heavy rain, and now one could not tell whether the air had cleared or not. It was almost hot. She wound down the car windows, and took in the damp warm sappy breath of the day. To either side of her the ploughed fields smoked and exhaled. The earth gave up its moisture visibly. The hedgerow trees were a fresh newborn pale green, sprinkled with the white flowers of the blackthorn. Blackbirds and chaffinches sang, lambs bleated, and a bird that looked like a golden oriole or a bird of paradise flew over, hazardously and retrospectively identified by Alix as an azure and emerald-flashing magpie trailing a twig longer than itself. The crust of the world warmed and blossomed. The verges were yellow with dandelion, coltsfoot, celandine, primrose, daffodil. No more would Beaver see the greening of the year. He had written tenderly of the spring. ‘You and I are both pantheists, Bowen,’ he had said to her once. And she had laughed,
and agreed that it might be so. Now he had returned to the great turning. I wish, thought Alix, a little enviously, that I had it in me to write just one little poem, just one little good poem, about the spring.

  Meanwhile, more pressingly, what on earth was she going to say to Angela? She had not stood up to Angela very well last time. She had not been an eloquent advocate for Human Nature, or Human Matter, or whatever it was in Paul that she represented. She had allowed Angela to carry the day. But what could one say to a woman like Angela? Perhaps she merely wished to confirm the hopelessness of Angela. To carry to Paul a message to forget.

  The day is really quite exceptional. She stops for petrol, and while a red-haired Celtic-looking young man in khaki overalls fills the tank she feels the sun on her face, on her bare neck, on the backs of her hands. Her skin softens, breathes. She takes off her cardigan and rolls down her pop sox and unbuttons her shirt. She drives on. Now there are white wind flowers on the banks, and she thinks she sees a cowslip. And yes, it was near here, surely, that forty years ago, on a school outing, she and her friends had found a place by the river, and had taken off their clothes and swum in their school knickers, innocent, flat-chested, transported. A day of paradise. Splashing in the shallows. Kingcups and lady’s smocks.

  She wishes she did not have to go to Hartley Court, but there is the little town, clustered in the valley, and there is the cattle grid, and the white board. Shall she pretend she has come to buy a dog? What shall she do if Angela abuses her?

  But Angela is not there. Nobody is there. The house is shuttered, boarded. It looks eerie, forlorn. The clumps of daffodils are browning and withering, the grass is unmown. A few tulips stand, straggling, red, uncertainly attentive, feeble soldiers guarding nothing. Weeds smother the flowerbeds.

  A notice is pinned to the fine front door, just below the Medusa head. Boldly, Alix gets out of her car, crosses the gravel, reads it. It says back tomorrow, but it looks old already, water-stained, fading.

  Is she relieved, is she disappointed? She cannot tell. She stands, irresolute. And then she hears the whining and the barking.

  The dogs, of course. There they are, in their cages up behind the house, greeting her, hurling themselves against their bars. They look hungry, but then they looked hungry last time. And they cannot get out. No, of course they cannot get out.

  Alix wanders back to her car, kicking at the gravel with her grey plimsoll. She stands with her hand on the car door. It is an anti-climax. She was keyed for action. There is no action.

  She looks up at the house, at the shuttered windows, at the drawn curtains of upper rooms, at the fluttering message. Then she begins to walk towards the rear of the house, listening as she goes to the changing tenor of the dogs, to a kind of frenzy of disappointment in their howling. Perhaps they are starving, perhaps they have been abandoned. Why does the house look so very, very shut? Are Angela and the Doctor and the Colonel lying dead in there, the victims of whoever was snooping on that Saturday night? Mass country house murders have been fashionable of late.

  Alix proceeds, quietly, on her soft shoes, Mrs Nosy Parker herself. She reaches the back door, or one of the warren of several back doors. She tries it. Luckily it does not open. She peers through a window, but can see nothing. She moves on to another door, a door to a sort of cottage annexe, and pauses with her hand on its handle. From within, she can hear a terrible whimpering. Not a barking or a howling, but a small desperate high-pitched whimpering, a lone voice. It is a heart-rending sound. She tries the handle, and it gives, but she dares not open. She shuts it, keeping the knob in her hand. There is an appalling smell reeking at her from the crack that she has opened and closed. Within, the solitary brave whimpering continues, urgently.

  There is a window, to the side of the door beneath a corrugated iron roof. She is too small to see through it. She looks around, and sees a heap of rubbish, an overflowing dustbin, a crate, an old enamel bucket, a cardboard box of tins of dog food. She builds herself an unsteady little platform, climbs up on it, and looks through the window.

  She can see quite clearly into the room now. It is one of the dog-rooms that Angela showed her. Alix stares in horror. She can hardly believe her eyes.

  Hanging from the ceiling, suspended from a beam, where earlier had hung a bunch of unskinned rabbits, is a horse’s head. Beneath the horse’s head lies a heap of dead and dying dogs. Some of them are dead, dead surely, skeletal, starved, collapsed, caved in, their ribs standing out, their lips drawn back in the grin of death. Others are still alive, still just alive, just stirring. One of them, hearing her, seeing her, sensing her, makes a dreadful effort, and rears itself up from the heap of corpses, only to collapse silently once more. Which is the one that is making this terrible, plaintive, persistent whimpering weeping sound? She cannot see it, it must be out of her line of vision, beneath her, just behind the door. The strongest survivor, the most pitifully hopeful, the last to die. It continues to call to her, with a terrible pleading.

  Alix steps down from her rickety vantage point, and stands on the ground. She is shocked, disgusted, appalled. Those poor dogs, she says to herself, aloud. Those poor poor dogs. She had thought that the dogs themselves disgusted her, but seeing them like this, how can one feel anything but pity? How can dogs disgust?

  What on earth has happened? Has Angela abandoned them? Is this intentional? What is that rotting maggoty horse’s head doing, suspended out of their reach?

  Alix knows she dare not open the door. She knows she must go and look for help, tell someone, tell the police of Hartley Bridge, summon the RSPCA. The whining of the unseen dog pleads with her, calls her. It is a brave one, this unseen dog, it will not die quietly. She wishes that she dare open the door, rescue it, try to save it from the black hole. But she knows it is more sensible to get help.

  She climbs back on to the box, for another look, and this time she sees the noisy young dog. It is still on its feet, unsteady, skinny, limping, but on its feet. It has backed away from the door, and is standing in the centre of the room, howling. Alix taps on the pane of glass. It looks up at her She waves at it. ‘Hang on little dog,’ she says. She climbs down again, and rips at the damp cardboard boxes of Pedigree Chum. There is enough meat here for all these dead and dying tormented creatures. But where is a tin opener? She dare not break into the house to look for one. What has she got in the car? Only her tool kit. She goes and gets her tool kit. She hammers at the tin with the screwdriver and spanner, has slowly made a deep jagged hole before she remembers that Sam’s Swiss Army knife is in the car glove-pocket. She goes back for it, hacks away with it, succeeds in removing most of the lid of one of the tins. She climbs back on to her platform, breaks the glass of the window (it falls, crashing, splintering, and releases foul air) and drops the tin as gently as she can. The survivor dog goes for it, is still strong enough to go for it. Alix starts on another tin. She will throw this in too, she thinks, then go to the village for help.

  This is what she thinks, but this is not what happens. For while she is hacking at the second tin, she hears the sound of a car on the gravel. Is she frightened, at eleven thirty on a spring morning, in broad daylight? Well, yes, she is. But she is also very angry. She stands, holding the jagged tin and the Swiss Army knife. Angela’s car rounds the corner, comes to a halt. Angela is alone.

  Angela gets out, stares at Alix. And just what do you think you’re doing here?’ she says, her hands on her hips, glowering, her red hair in a blazing crest.

  ‘And just what do you think you’re doing to these dogs?’ says Alix, standing before the door of the dog house, the dog morgue.

  ‘That’s my business,’ says Angela. ‘I warned you. I warned you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

  The woman is mad, Alix realizes. She has always been mad.

  ‘Get out of here,’ says Angela.

  ‘All right, all right,’ says Alix. ‘But only if you feed these dogs. Your dogs are dying. I’ll report you. I’ll get you for this.’


  Angela advances upon Alix. Alix brandishes her tin and her knife. Angela continues to advance. A sort of hysterical laughter rises in Alix’s throat, but she backs away from Angela, she cannot help it, she backs away and stands with her back against the door.

  ‘Get away,’ she says to Angela. In all her mild life she has never before been threatened with violence. ‘Get away, don’t touch me, get away.’

  Angela advances. Alix throws the tin at her, not very hard, but at that range she cannot miss, and it hits Angela square in her cream-bloused chest. Angela grabs Alix’s arm, Alix takes a step back, the door of the dog prison opens behind her, and she falls backwards into it on to her bum as Angela pushes her. But now her hesitations are over, she struggles up, gets back to her feet, punches back at Angela, hits out at her with her knife-hand. Angela backs off, she is frightened. ‘Don’t touch me,’ yells Alix, ‘you dreadful woman, you monster woman, you bitch you, don’t touch me, keep away!’

  Angela stands back, panting, bleeding, spattered with Pedigree Chum. The door behind Alix swings open, revealing the heap of dying flesh, the swinging head with its great dull white eyes, the staggering survivor dog trembling on its bowed legs. ‘Look,’ yells Alix, pointing at the dog, ‘look what you’ve done! Haven’t you done enough? Look what you’ve done!’