The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘A society without human beings’, says Daniel gravely, ‘is a radical concept.’ Patsy permits herself to snigger.

  ‘A society without human beings’, says Gogo, breaking her silence, ‘is exactly what she seems to have designed for herself.’

  Nathan and David and Patsy quickly exchange guilty glances: so the game of Unhappy Families is back upon the table. David has done his best to distract, but he has failed. The Palmers are relentless. They could bring any topic home. They could lasso conversations about gardening, or the cinema, or the Hubble telescope, or the sugar industry, or Guyanese politics, or the slave-trade, and bring them home to graze about their mother.

  ‘I mean, for God’s sake,’ says Gogo. A long pause follows. She has the floor. ‘The Witch of Exmoor,’ she says, echoing a phrase that Rosemary has tried out on her over their picnic lunch on the lawn.

  ‘It just isn’t habitable,’ continues Rosemary. ‘She can’t go on living there. At her age. It’s impossible. We all thought the Mausoleum was bad enough. This is a thousand times worse. At least the Mausoleum was in reach of public transport. Well, almost. I think Daniel ought to go and have a look. Show a bit of masculine authority.’

  Daniel smiles his thin, dry, bleached smile. His spare face is briefly irradiated by a sad, mocking, uncertain light. His sisters mocked him much.

  ‘Describe it again, Rosie,’ he says. He enjoys her recital. He might as well take pleasure from it.

  ‘Well' says Rosemary. ‘To begin with, it’s vast. And it’s hideous. And it’s uninhabitable. And what electricity there is keeps going off. And it’s about to fall into the sea.’

  ‘It’s literally on the edge of the sea?’

  ‘On the very edge. Perched. And the drive–well, you can’t really call it a drive. It’s hardly even a track. It’s more or less impassable. Deep ruts. Great pot-holes. Stuff growing out of the hedges. It was bad enough getting down it in the spring. God knows what it’s like in winter. And it’s four hours from London even if you put your foot down all the way along the motorway. And then all those miles over the moor. There’s a sign, written on a piece of cardboard. I stopped to read it. It said BEWARE OF VIPERS BREEDING.’

  It is the first time they have heard this detail: they respond with suitable admiration.

  ‘Did it mean it literally? Vipers, literally vipers?’

  ‘I should think so! It looked real snake country to me. You could feel them round about. You know, roots and bracken. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing there. She’s got no connection with that part of the country at all. If she wants to go native why doesn’t she go back to Lincolnshire where she says she came from? Or Sweden, come to that?’

  ‘She always said she wanted to live in the country,’ says Daniel.

  ‘Yes, but why choose Exmoor? It can’t mean anything to her.’

  ‘Hampshire means nothing to me,’ says Daniel. ‘But I happen to like it here. I don’t see why she shouldn’t live on Exmoor if she wants.’

  ‘In a derelict hotel?’

  ‘I thought you said it was a folly.’

  ‘It’s hard to know what it is. It’s enormous. She only lives in a bit of it.’

  ‘And it’s a four-hour drive?’

  ‘At least. It was just over 200 miles on the clock, but the last 60 are a nightmare. And I can tell you it’s not very nice to drive for four hours and then have the door more or less slammed in your face.’

  Daniel and Gogo like this bit best.

  ‘So she didn’t want you to come in?’

  ‘Not really. She kept me out there in this terrible overgrown courtyard. Netties everywhere. And it was pissing with rain. She had her back to the door as though she was guarding something. I had to say I was dying for a pee before she’d let me in. And then she said, why didn’t you stop a bit earlier and pee in the hedge?’

  They all laugh at this sally, and not for the first time.

  ‘What was the lavatory like?’ inquires Emily, freshly.

  ‘Well, it was clean. But sort of basic. No lavatory seat, for example. Nothing extra. Except spiders. Those long leggy ones. Lots of them-’

  ‘Her familiars,’ says Gogo.

  ‘No pot plants, no toilet rolls, no little cane tables, no volumes of verse?’

  ‘There was a toilet roll, but God it was damp. The damp there is a killer.’

  ‘And she gave you a slice of corned beef,’ prompts Gogo.

  ‘Yes, a slice of corned beef. And a piece of soggy Ryvita. It tasted a thousand years old. There’s a cold like mildew down there. It bites. It’s full of microbes. Full of fungus spores. It fills the lungs. I can’t describe how horribly cold it was. And this was mid-May.’

  ‘She wasn’t expecting you,’ ventures Patsy in extenuation.

  ‘How could she be expecting anyone if she won’t have a telephone?’ returns Rosemary.

  ‘Perhaps she really doesn’t want to see us,’ says Daniel. (This is the kind of thing he says.)

  ‘Well,’ says Rosemary, with gravitas, ‘that would seem to be the message. She says she doesn’t want to see anyone. She says she’s too busy. I said busy doing what, and she said she was busy being a recluse. She said it was a full-time job.’

  They all laugh, and there is a respect in their laughter, for Frieda has turned the tables on them this time. They are surrounded by friends who complain at length of the burden of visiting their aged relatives, their aunts with Alzheimer’s, their fathers grumpy with cancer or heart conditions or gout, their mothers whining of the treacheries of the past: none of them has a mother who does not want to see them. It is against the natural order. What have they done to earn such rejection? Frieda has removed herself from their concern and set off into the unknown. They had seen trouble coming a year or more ago, when she suddenly decided to sell the family home and all that was in it, but they had not expected a removal as dramatic as this. She had sold the big house in Romley (optimistically and falsely described by the estate agents as ‘on the borders of Stoke Newington’) and purchased a dilapidated thirty-room Victorian castle by the sea.

  ‘But you said she looked well enough,’ says Daniel.

  ‘Oh, yes, she looks well enough. I think she’s lost weight. Well, one would, on a diet like that. Worse than a health farm. God knows where the nearest shop is.’

  ‘I don’t see how we can intervene,’ says Daniel, who has no wish to be sent off to Exmoor as family delegate. ‘She’s not doing any harm up there, is she?’

  ‘Not to us,’ says Gogo. ‘She can’t harm us any more. She’s done her worst.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ says Daniel, rethinking his position as a new light strikes him. ‘She’s only in her sixties.’

  ‘I’m not so sure either,’ says Rosemary. ‘I told you what she said about remaking her will? She said she was going to reallocate her posthumous copyrights. Is she allowed to do that?’

  ‘Of course she is,’ says David D’Anger, roused by this brazen assertion of family rights of interest in family money. ‘She can do what she wants with them.’

  The three Palmers turn their eyes upon him, the dark intruder.

  ‘Perhaps yon’d better go and see her and find out what she’s really up to,’ says Rosemary. ‘She’d listen to you, David. She favours you.’

  ‘I’d go,’ says David. ‘I’d go, in the autumn. If you thought it was a good idea.’

  His ready acquiescence both pleases and disquiets them. What does David D’Anger hope to gain from a trip to the West Country? There can be nothing to interest him there. Westminster, the West Indies and West Yorkshire, fair enough, he has interests in all of those–but the West Country, surely not?

  ‘You won’t like it there,’ says Rosemary. ‘You should have seen her face, when she saw me getting out of the car. You may laugh, but it wasn’t very funny.’

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ says Daniel.

  ‘Neither am I,’ says Gogo.

  ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ s
ays Rosemary.

  ‘Money is money,’ says Nathan solemnly, provocatively. ‘You don’t want her leaving it all to pay off the National Debt, do you?’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ says Rosemary, ‘that building’s like a black hole. You don’t believe me. It’s worse than any of you imagine. It’ll probably slide down the cliff and into the sea. And then where will we be?’

  Although it is no laughing matter, the thought of their mother sliding into the sea, on a dark night, has its comic aspects. They elaborate, and I am sorry to say that they laugh. And, in conclusion, it is agreed that David and Gogo, come the autumn, will risk the journey and the mildew and the corned beef. They will take Benjamin as peacemaker, they volunteer. How will she be able to alienate herself and her fortune from her own children and grandchildren? (If Daniel and Rosemary have suspicions about this plan, they keep them to themselves.)

  Upstairs, in the bunk room, the youngest of those grandchildren, Jessica and Jonathan Herz, are playing with the fast-forward button on one of the house’s several video machines. They are trying to find the bit with the child-eating zombies, but they are not trying very seriously: they are waiting, in a state of heightened excitement, for their cousin Benjamin D’Anger to come back from his bedroom with the Game. Many a video nasty have they watched up there in the nursery for their aunt Patsy Palmer has a professional interest in video nasties and no interest whatsoever in domestic censorship. But none of the videos is anything like as frightening, exciting, wicked and seductive as the Power Game. Jessica and Jon love coming to stay with Uncle Daniel and Aunt Patsy at the Old Farm when Ben is there, for Ben invented the Power Game and they cannot play it without him. He is the Master of the Game, and they wait for him in a slightly fevered anticipation. Will it be as exciting as it was last time? Will Ben let them change roles this time? Will he have made up more of the story as he promised? He has been mysterious about it all day, for it is a late and secret game, and it has to wait for a certain hour of the night–tonight he had dictated that it should be ten thirty. The minutes have flicked by on the video clock, and now they wait, sitting on the floor in their pyjamas, round the space they have cleared. (They have built a wall of video boxes, in preparation. It is the city wall.)

  And here comes Ben, the divine, the lanky, the dark boy. Ben D’Anger glows with darkness. He wears a yellow night-shirt, and he carries in his arms the large box called Decapolis which holds the Game. Jessica (who is indifferent pale and freckled) wets her lips and tugs at the elasticated waist of her pyjamas. Jon sucks a dark ringlet as he sits, cross-legged, bespectacled, alert, the braces on his teeth glinting in the dimmed light. Ben stands there for a moment, with his arms around Decapolis. It looks innocent: a large cardboard box which once held several dozen tins of dog food, for the dull Dalmatian of the house. He lowers it, ceremoniously. The Herz children silently ask him if, in their month’s absence, it has been tampered with. They need no words. He shakes his head. He needs no words. It is intact. Emily has appointed herself its guardian. Emily keeps it safe in her bedroom. It lies in the bottom of her wardrobe, and Patsy is too busy or too lazy to disturb it. Emily is proud to be in collusion, though she has never seen the Game.

  Now they begin to unpack its treasures, and lay them out within the video city. Their co-operation is unspoken, intense, complete. First they range the old wooden soldiers salvaged by Daniel from Grandma Frieda’s house in Romley. They are handmade period pieces from a bygone age, dating from an unknown childhood. Scraps of faded colour cling to them. Then they line the walls of the video city with the little white plaster busts of the unpainted Rajputani riflemen, lovingly made by a great-great-uncle on the Palmer side who had served long years with the riflemen in India. Then they lay down the pieces of blue ribbon that represent the three great rivers, the Oronoque, the Essequibo and the Demerara, and plant by them the realistic little educational plastic trees of oak and cedar and palm and fig and ebony, and arrange the farmyard animals and the cattle. The scale is bizarre, but that is one of the peculiar thrills of creation. They erect the house called Eldorado, the house called Cayenne, and they lay out the Island of the Dead. Decapolis is a four-cornered city: three of the houses are fortified and occupied, and the fourth is called the Siege House of Hope and Despair. Ben will allot them each a fortress within this small kingdom, and then the game can begin.

  It takes nearly half an hour to arrange the site to Ben’s satisfaction. He places a lion on a wall, a wolf in a garden, and floats innocent ducks upon the mirror-lake. The materials are heterogeneous–wood, metal, plastic, fabric. There are no prehistoric monsters, for Ben has banned them–they are, he says to Jon and Jessica, banal. ‘Banal’ is currently his favourite word. Nor will he admit space monsters. ‘Everything must be of the earth,' he insists seriously. Otherwise it will not work.

  Because it is real. Ben can make them believe it is real. Ben animates everything. His power to breathe life into objects is supernatural, and they know it. He says he can stare at a postcard and make its leaves shake, its rivers flow, its ships sail across the sea, its figures walk the streets. They believe him. He cannot do it when anyone is watching, for that destroys his powers, but he can do it. At night, alone, he tells them, he can bring to life the paintings on the wall. How does he do it? He stares and stares until his eyes lose focus, he says, as one stares at a three-dimensional computer picture, and then the picture begins to move. Can he get inside the picture, they ask? No, he can never get inside. He is always outside, staring. His are the eyes that make it move. He can never enter into his own vision. He is for ever without. But he has the power. He has the Magic Eye.

  They are nearly ready now. It is all laid out, and waiting. It is waiting for the Breath of Life. There is a fear in their anticipation, for last time there had been many wounded, many tortured, many raped, many dead. Drowned, washed downriver, stuck through with bayonets, hurled from high buildings. How will it go this time?

  This time, Ben tells Jessica she must possess as her captain the little Indian clay elephant man called Trincomalee. Her fortress will be Eldorado. Jon must possess the figure of St Joseph, taken from some long dismantled Christmas cake: his fortress will be Cayenne. Ben has allotted himself that icy and treacherous terrain, the Isle aux Morts, and his captain will be Beltenebros, on his hone, Bayard. The Metal Queen will occupy the Siege House. She must defend herself without human aid. If she falls, there will be forfeits. There will perhaps be executions. Does one desire to die, or not to die? It is confusing, disturbing. Death is pleasure. Death is pleasant.

  Ben distributes the troops. So many soldiers to each army, so many horses, so many black painted cotton reels of ammunition, and one ambulance apiece.

  Ben instructs his cousins to stare hard at the small figures. He begins the incantation. They must mesmerize themselves. Jessica stares at the small painted features of Trincomalee, at the black and white and red and brown of his clay. He bares his origins bravely. His blue turban is striped with a pure band of yellow. Jon fixes his attention on the gaudier St Joseph with his tawdry cloak and his cheap Taiwanese colours. Ben fixes himself upon the medieval knight, Beltenebios. ‘Decapolis, decapolis, decapolis,’ he murmurs. ‘Isle aux Morts, Isle du Diable, Isle a la Crosse, Isle des Saintes.’ Their eyes blur. The small figures begin to march across the carpet. Battle is engaged. This is not a pleasant game. The birds of death gather for the corpses. For many games past, the saviour has not come. Maybe he will never come.

  Outside in the garden, Nathan puffs at a last cigarette. He has sneaked out. He is still pondering, in a desultory manner, the conundrum of the Veil of Ignorance. From his own original position, as a clever Jewish lad in suburban lower-middle-class East Finchley, he would have found it hard to imagine the details of the world he temporarily inhabits–this lawn, these scented trees, these in-laws, these assumptions. Had the Veil of Ignorance been snatched from his sixteen-year-old eyes, he would have been surprised by this flash forward. He had been ambitious
enough–more ambitious then than he is now–but he would not have recognized the significance of the decor of his life to be. Indeed, as he knows, he does not wholly know it now. He treads his cigarette end into the lawn furtively, then furtively bends and picks it up again and puts it in his pocket. Patsy and Daniel are proud of their garden and spend time on it. They talk about it. They even talk about it to Nathan, although they must know that he is a lost cause. The flower culture of the English middle classes pisses him off. The names of old roses make him ill. He knows more brand names of cigarettes and detergents than he knows names of flowers. Yet he likes to be here, for an evening.

  He takes another turn along the kitchen-garden wall. It has been the first really hot day of the year, but a slight dew is forming underfoot, and a large liquorice-black ribbed slug crosses his path. He peers at it through the thick lenses of his glasses. There is a slightly unpleasant smell on the air, which his cigarette has not overwhelmed. He sniffs. It is coming from those pink roses, those small clustery yellow-stamened pink roses, which no doubt have some very special pretty tide. He approaches them, sniffs more closely. A rotting, fecal, fungal smell. The smell of old rose, of old England, of old women. They are probably called the Duchess of Death, or Cuisse de Vieille, or Marquise de la Mort. Do all roses smell so disgusting? Experimentally, he progresses to a standard rose of deeper crimson, with larger flowers. These smell quite strongly of cheap soap. Never would Nathan inflict a scent so crude upon the British customer.

  You have not guessed quite right about Nathan. He is not an academic, though that, with those pebble glasses, that meditative look, those untidy stained baggy weekend trousers, is what he ought to be. He ought to be a professor of immunology or anthropology, but in fact he is in advertising, and on a weekday, in his business suiting, he is more convincing in the role. At weekends he overflows into a ki nd of uncontrolled, deliberate grossness. He is crudely and aggressively Jewish: his large fleshy nose and his broad fingers, his large dark eyes speak of a rich and oriental world he has never visited, a world a thousand miles from East Finchley. Hairs sprout, at the weekends, unrestrained from his chest. They sprout all year round, day and night, from his ears and nostrils and the backs of his hands. Women long to stroke his chest, though as far as he knows they do not long to tweak at his nostrils. He is an attractive man, and he knows it.