A Natural Curiosity

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A Natural Curiosity Page 30

by Margaret Drabble


  Angela has met her match in the mad-eyed Alix. She looks frightened. Alix knows she has won. Alix is still armed. She brandishes the small knife. She makes towards her car; backing away, taking care not to turn her back on Angela. ‘I’ll get you,’ shouts Angela, as soon as Alix is out of close range. ‘I’ll get you!’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ yells Alix, in a voice she didn’t know she’d got. ‘I’ve got you. You remember that. I’ve got you.’ She gets into her car, fumbles desperately in her pocket for the car keys, switches on. ‘I’m off to report you now, you sadistic bitch,’ she shouts, through her lowered window, as she violently puts the car into reverse and then swings forward, and scrapes away across the drive.

  She accelerates, triumphant, but has to stop, shaking, as she rejoins the road. She pulls in to one side, considers, and as she considers, notices how appallingly she smells. She is covered in dog shit and lumps of Chum and decomposing slime. Dog Matter. The back of her denim skirt, her shoes, her shirt are all filthy. Disgusting. Disgusting. She smells worse than a charnel house. Dog food has always struck her as one of the most disgusting substances on earth, worse even than dog shit, and now she is covered in it. Can she really present herself at the police station looking like this, smelling like this? No, she cannot. She considers her position, switches on, and drives slowly off, away from Hartley Bridge, and onwards, up the dale.

  What she needs is a telephone box, but there are not so many telephone boxes in Upper Hartdale. The next village is Ossbury, will there be a box there, will it be empty, will she be able to use it unobtrusively? There is, it is, and she can. She has planned her statement. 999, she rings. Why waste time? Police, she says she wants. She says she wants to report an incident at Hartley Court. An assault. She rings off, and does not give her name. Then she drives on. She is a criminal. A self-confessed criminal. She had committed Bodily Harm. Maybe even Grievous Bodily Harm.

  As she winds on, up the dale, stinking, the beauty of her position becomes clear to her. Angela cannot report her, as Angela does not want anybody to know where she is or who she is, and Alix is the only person who knows these things. Angela will have to suffer the dog food and the wound in silence. She will have to make up some story about her assailant. If Alix wishes to confess, that will be Alix’s choice. And meanwhile, Alix will get on to the RSPCA, and get Angela locked up for maltreating the Colonel’s dogs. It seems a satisfactory revenge. And if the Colonel and the Doctor have other secrets, well, that is their problem. Somehow Alix knows they have.

  Alix the criminal feels light of heart. She has done a good deed. Maybe she has rescued the last tottering dog. And she has vindicated her theory about Paul Whitmore. He had been mothered by a mad woman, a fury, a harpy, a gorgon. He had been tormented, like the dogs, in a punishment block, with bloody treats hanging out of reach over his head. Poor Paul was exonerated. Angela is the guilty one. The finger points at Angela.

  But now, she will have to get rid of this smell. She cannot stand it any longer. The moist warm sunny air aggravates the mingled odours. She will find water, and wash herself clean.

  The road is mounting, now, away from the bed of the valley. She takes a small unsignposted turning, down to the right; it is little more than a cart track. She hopes it will lead her back to the river. And it does, or would, but it peters out by a five-barred gate tied up with orange-pink plastic string. Alix parks the car, and gets out, and leans on the gate. Yes, there will be the water, down beyond that curve, where the track leads onwards. She thinks she can hear it.

  She examines herself, gingerly. Her clothes have had it. They are irrecoverable. She will have to throw them away. Has she got anything else to wear? In the back of the car are, as so often, Sam’s swimming things, a damp stewed bundle in a plastic bag. The towel will be useful, but his trunks not. She rummages under the rubbish and finds a providential package destined for Oxfam or the Spastics. Hopefully, she opens it, and discovers that it contains the never-worn Maltese lace blouse rejected by Liz at the time of the Pink Party, and a long black slinky sequined evening skirt from c. 1969. She gazes at them in admiration. She is glad to have found a good use for the Maltese blouse, to be able to give the slinky skirt its last airing, its final fling. She puts them in the plastic bag with Sam’s damp chlorine-perfumed towel, and climbs over the gate and sets off down the track towards what she hopes will be the water.

  It is high noon, and the air shimmers. There is a little copse to one side, moorland to the other. Over the moorland, a black and white bird plays, tumbles and shrieks. The ground is dry yet spongy. There are purple, white and yellow flowers at her feet. The track winds down, and yes, she hears the sound of water, and there is the river, tumbling, flowing, sparkling, brown, vivid. It will be cold, she knows, but not that cold, to one who learned to swim in the cold waters of the North Sea. There is even a little beach for her, a brown mud beach, and a pool in the river’s bend. She struggles out of her soiled garments, and stands there, naked, gazing upstream, her feet sinking into the mud. She sees a vivid flash of blue. A kingfisher. Her heart leaps with delight. She knows she is peculiarly blessed. The bank is spangled with wind flowers, their seven-petalled faces like mystic day-stars. Alder and oak in tiny bud lean over the water.

  The water is cold, but she braves it. She splashes, immerses herself limb by limb, rolls in it, cleanses herself. Weeds tumble past her, she thinks she sees a fish. She rises, dripping, newly baptized, and clambers to the bank, and dries herself. She sits there, on Sam’s towel, in the sun. She gazes at the trees, at the flowing water, at a branch bending low over the water, a branch of rubbed, smooth dark wood. A much used branch. The sacred grove, the sacred pool. It is an old friendly place. Others swim here. Here they hang their garments, while they swim.

  She dresses herself, struggling into the Maltese blouse and the sequined skirt (she has put on a little weight since the 1960s, not as much as Liz, but a little) and bundles her old stuff into the bag. She will throw the bag away when she reaches civilization and its rubbish bins. She flings Sam’s towel nonchalantly round her shoulders, and sticks a glossy kingcup behind her ear. Then she strides barefoot back up the track, toward her car.

  Somebody is waiting for her. An old man leans on the gate, as he has leant for centuries. His face is gnarled and wrinkled. He is dark and small of stature, as his people were and are. He smiles at tall Alix, as she approaches up the track. His smile is broad, knowing, capacious, unsurprised. Ceremoniously, he unties the pink plastic string for her, and ceremoniously he swings open the gate for her. He holds it as she passes through.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, in her foreign tongue, bowing her head slightly in gratitude. He says nothing, but he continues to smile. Their eyes meet. Her heart overflows. It is one of the most satisfactory, one of the most benign encounters of her life.

  Brian was surprised and slightly disturbed by Alix’s insistence upon revenge. She told him all now, belatedly: told him that evening, as she stirred the cheese sauce. She told him that she had already rung the RSPCA and reported Angela. This time she had given her name. ‘They said they’d go at once,’ said Alix. ‘I hope they give her a good long sentence.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Brian. ‘And anyway, people don’t get put in prison for ill-treating dogs.’

  ‘Don’t they?’ said Alix, tossing her hair out of her eyes, and stirring busily as the sauce thickened. ‘Don’t they? Well, they should.’

  ‘Now, you don’t think that,’ said Brian.

  ‘You should have seen those dogs,’ said Alix.

  After a while, Alix calms down and agrees that Angela is clearly off her rocker and therefore not responsible. But that doesn’t mean that Alix wasn’t right to get in the RSPCA.

  ‘Look,’ said Alix, ‘what else can I get her for?’

  ‘You don’t have to get her at all.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I owe it to Paul.’

  Brian hopes that this story is near its end. He has had enough of it. He does not lik
e the new vindictive note in Alix’s voice, the new glitter in her eye. He encourages her to describe, once more, Angela’s attack upon Alix, Alix’s retaliation.

  ‘Look,’ said Alix, ‘I don’t care what I did to her. She’ll never dare bring a charge against me. She’s in no position to.’

  Brian has some vague idea that once an assault has been reported to the police, there is no way of a charge not being brought. He hopes he has got this wrong. But anyway, Alix is indifferent to this prospect. In a way, she might even relish it.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Alix, pouring the cheese sauce on to leeks and hard-boiled eggs and looking noisily for the paprika, ‘I wouldn’t at all mind appearing in the dock to explain precisely why I threw that tin at Angela Whitmore. I think I’d be able to make a few points to the general public. Don’t you?’

  Brian looked uncomfortable, and patted Alix’s shoulder in a placating manner. He could only hope that Angela was as keen to hush things up as a normal person might be. But with two mad women, one of them sniffing martyrdom and casting herself as an apologist for murder, and the other a dog-torturer, clearly way beyond the call of reason, who could tell what to expect? Angela ought to put self-preservation first. But people don’t always do what they ought, do they?

  Shirley Harper is staying with Marcia Campbell in Marcia’s London flat. She likes it much better at Marcia’s than she ever liked it at Liz’s. It is more her scale. It is more like home. She sits on Marcia’s comfortable settee, her feet tucked up beneath her, and looks around approvingly. There are many reassuring features. Marcia has the same brass wall brackets as Shirley, she has the same John Lewis trolley, and the same Habitat coffee mugs. In the bathroom, miraculously, she even has the same green and ivory lotus wallpaper, with matching curtains. Shirley has commented on these coincidences, and Marcia has smiled and nodded, as though there is nothing surprising about them at all. Marcia does not comment on the fact that Liz’s house also has echoes of her own. Marcia and Liz, Marcia had observed, seem to share a penchant for cut glass. Shirley does not like cut glass.

  Marcia Campbell, sister ex machina, sits knitting a complicated pullover with a pattern of small red, grey and blue checks. As she has explained to Shirley, a lot of actresses knit, some of them rather well. It’s the hanging around, the waiting, says Marcia. One has to do something.

  Marcia has knitted her way through much of Shirley’s life story. Shirley finds it surprisingly easy to tell all to Marcia. Marcia has proved an invaluable ally, in this last difficult fortnight. She even accompanied Shirley (with Liz, of course) to Cliff’s inquest, and then to Cliff’s funeral which was very decent of her, in view of the fact that they’d only just met. She was very nice to Celia and to Barry, and even the censorious Celia seemed to approve of Marcia. (Marcia believes that Celia has known of her existence all along, but has kept her mouth shut. Celia is still water and runs deep.) Marcia has proved an excellent mediator with Robert Holland, who increasingly will not do, who is increasingly suspected of being a middle-aged bore and a philandering neurotic, but whose interest in Shirley has been much heightened by the Marcia factor. Marcia tacitly acknowledges that he will not do, while maintaining a perfectly friendly attitude towards his manoeuvres. It is all very amicable.

  Marcia’s flat is in unfashionable Acton. It is small, and warm, and richly patterned. It is cosy. Its furniture is soft and rounded and mature, like its owner. It is full—too full, sighs Marcia—of mementoes and keepsakes—framed photographs, saucers from Harrogate and Hay-on-Wye, postcards from Venezuela and Korea and New Zealand and Mali, beads and trinkets and bobbles and souvenirs. People are always giving things and sending things to Marcia, and, as she is a good-natured woman, she does not like to part with these offerings. She seems to have friends in all walks of life—bus drivers, knighted Thespians, managers of old people’s homes, schoolteachers, antique dealers, shopkeepers, swimming-pool attendants. Her life is heterogeneous. A magpie life. It’s because my parents ran this boarding house, she explains to Shirley. All sorts came through. Mainly theatrical, but lots of others, people from all over the world. They all came to us, and once they’d found us, they kept on coming back. It was like a family.

  Shirley is much taken with this diversity. There is room for her here too, in the corner of this settee.

  Marcia shares her flat with a black man. He is her live-in lover. One day they may marry. Or they may not. His name is Oliver, and he works at Bush House, for the World Service of the BBC. He was born in Trinidad, he tells Shirley, but was educated in Britain, and has worked here for thirty years. He is a very good-looking man, with a wry smile and a small moustache. He and Marcia have been together for three years now, he tells Shirley. He is very pleased to meet Shirley, he says, as he too comes from a large and complicated family and has many legitimate and illegitimate siblings and half-siblings. They are scattered round the globe, although concentrated mainly in the West Indies and the Home Counties. Like Shirley, like Marcia, he discovered the identity of his own father late in life.

  These mysteries seem natural to Marcia and Oliver. They do not seem fazed by them. They do not seem to think that the norm of suburban South Yorkshire is at all normal. It is only one of many patterns. They make all things seem possible. They are comfortingly unalarmed by the uncertainty of Shirley’s finances, by her muddles over the defunct business, the mortgaged house. They know people who are in much worse muddles than Shirley, people without a bean, without a penny, without a prospect, who manage to rub along all right, and come out the other side. Look, they have muddled through themselves, through terrible risks, ridiculous uncertainties! Consider the lilies, says Marcia, that was my Mum’s motto, when the milk ran out and the final notices came in. Consider the lilies.

  Marcia knits, Oliver smokes a French cigarette, Shirley sits and watches and wonders. All three are half-listening to the Elgar cello concerto on Radio Three. The deep warm forgiving strains fill the small enormous room. The first tears rise to Shirley’s eyes.

  Carla Davis cannot believe what she hears. Charles Headleand has betrayed her. He has agreed to accept the word of those murderous assassins, those crazed fanatics. He has issued a statement, on his return to England. He has spoken of conciliation and understanding. He has betrayed her in public. Carla is dark with rage. She will have her revenge. She has always hated Charles. She pours herself another large Scotch, and plots vengeance.

  Susie Enderby and Blake Leith make love in Blake’s house, in Blake’s bed, in Blake’s bedroom overlooking the North Sea. High on the cliff, above a waste of grey water, they embrace and entwine and separate and converge. The waves dash white foam at the red cliff’s foot. They are mad for one another, they are possessed, they writhe and moan and cry out. They are in deadly, deadly earnest. They had not meant this, but it has happened, it has overtaken them, it is impersonal, it sweeps them along. They cry out, the seagulls cry, their serpentine limbs coil and uncoil. When the paroxysms are over for a moment, when they are able to seize a moment’s repose, they wander naked to the window, and gaze down at the raging water. Blake, his arm around Susie’s bruised and savaged shoulders, quotes:

  For the foam flowers endure where the rose blossoms wither,

  And men that love lightly may die: but we?

  Susie shudders, quails. But there is no returning, for Susie and Blake Leith. On they must go, on and on, until they are let drop. And then what, then what? Ah, do not ask. How can there be an ending for this most unsuitable of couples?

  Fanny Kettle, shopping in Waitrose, catches sight of Alix Bowen. Alix waves, merrily, and they converge, their trollies interlocking. ‘Hi,’ says Alix, ‘how are things?’ Fanny and Alix have become quite friendly, brought together by the death of Beaver. Fanny had attended the funeral, resplendent in mink, with a dashing black felt hat and black rosetted shoes, and seamed black stockings. Alix has decided Fanny is simply a harmless well-meaning eccentric.

  ‘I’m great, thanks,’ says Fanny. ‘W
here did you find that asparagus? I didn’t see any.’

  ‘Oh, it’s back there somewhere,’ gestures Alix, vaguely, towards the rich international diversity of vegetables. ‘In the prepacked section, near the oyster mushrooms.’ (She is slightly embarrassed to be caught with extravagant asparagus amongst her purchases, and hopes Fanny’s eagle eyes have also noted the carrots, baby turnips and bumper packs of toilet tissue.)

  ‘I say,’ says Fanny, ‘what a terrible thing about that woman and the dogs, in the paper. Tony told me all about it. You were brave. I think it’s a scandal, only fining her £120. Will they close the place down?’

  ‘I think so,’ says Alix. She does not want to talk about it. She is sick of the whole thing. Revenge is not sweet after all. She has learned things about Angela Whitmore that she does not want to know. She has learned things about the Doctor and the Colonel that she does not want to know.

  ‘And Tony tells me you’re thinking of getting a dog yourselves?’

  ‘Oh, does he?’ says Alix. ‘We’ll see about that. Sam’s always wanted a dog, but I’m not sure I can face one.’

  ‘They are a terrible tie,’ says Fanny.

  And on this platitude, they part, Fanny towards the asparagus, Alix towards the butter.

  Paul Whitmore sits in his solitary cell. He has been rereading and rereading Alix’s letter. She has tried to explain him to himself, and he honours her attempt. She tells him that his mother is crazy. She alludes to the plight of the dogs. (Not all the dogs had been mistreated: some had been looked after with pride and care. Apparently this is a not unusual feature of cases of extreme abuse or neglect of animals.) She says his mother is in need of psychiatric treatment. She urges him not to think too much about his mother. She mentions the death of his twin sister.

 

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