The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  He wanders beyond the edge of the kitchen garden into the shrubbery. Here the smell is even worse. It is the sour and woody stink of elderflower, though he cannot identify its source.

  Nathan has harnessed his alpha brain to selling products and, occasionally, concepts, for he is respected and astute, and on the way up in a flourishing company. As he inhales the verdant rot, and wipes a glob of white cuckoo spittle from his naked ankle, he contemplates the myth of rural England which has been so successfully marketed to the affluent English. And it is not entirely a myth, for it is here, and now, this little wood, these insects, that calling bird. There is some kind of a fit, however clumsy, between the image and the reality. Daniel’s farmhouse, more comfortable now than ever in its working days, is hundreds of years old, and this little wood is older than the house. Ancient coppiced woodland. Vegetables have been grown here for centuries, and for centuries roses have scented and corrupted the air. And who is to say that Daniel and Patsy do not work as hard as any farmer? They work.

  Marmalades and mustards and jellies with silly little frills and ribbons round their throats, Victorian pillowcases with honeysuckle patterns, ‘Home Baked’ biscuits from the factory, pomanders, posies, lavender bags, pots-pourris (pourri indeed, nods Nathan to himself)–one cannot accuse Daniel and Patsy of falling into many of these consumer traps. They have better taste. They bake their bread and eat it. Why, then, this deep unease? Is it envy? Is it some deeper disapproval?

  The rural England of the advertising commercial is superimposed on the palimpsest of the England of Hampshire in the 1990s, and that again is superimposed upon the reality of the past, the unknowable reality of history. The layers of image fade, fuse, fix, peel, wrinkle, part.

  Nathan lights another cigarette. The selling and packaging of England. He has taken part in it. He had intended to be an anthropologist, but reading Mary Douglas on the meaning of shopping had revealed to him the light. He had been twenty-one at the time and about to sit his Finals. Suddenly he had seen it all, revealed in the broad rays of the future. Shopping was indeed our new religion. Consumer choice, in a post-industrial society, was our area of free will, informed perhaps by grace. He would participate in the new faith, as priest, as confessor. He would set up his stall in the Temple.

  God, how right he had been, how horribly, uncannily right. Nathan the prophet. Even he would not have predicted the degree to which shopping as a full-time pursuit would have caught on in the last fifteen years. The supermarket and shopping centre as fun-fair, family outing, parkland, playground, stately home, temple, youth club, old people’s refuge: the shopping arcade as the forum of assignation, rape, abduction, murder, riot. Oh fountains, oh palaces, oh dreams and aspirations! Let us enter those revolving doors, wide enough to take a trolley loaded with £200 of edible merchandise! It is at once glorious and appalling. Is it, he wonders, in his blood? He does not know much about his own blood. His ancestry cannot be traced. His mother would have preferred him to be a doctor or a lawyer. She is timid and conventional and has been much put upon by false images of an alien tribe.

  (But perhaps not quite put upon enough. Nathan had turned to her one evening–turned on her, that’s how she put it–and asked her why on earth she had called him Nathan. I mean, what kind of a name is Nathan, for Godsake, he had demanded. I’ll tell you what kind of name it is, Ma. It’s a Jewish name.)

  Miriam Herz would have liked her son Nathan to be more like Daniel Palmer. Daniel is a successful barrister, as you might have guessed. He could have been a civil servant, for his manner is mandarin, but he chose the law.

  If choice is what he had, if choosing is what we do. Amazing, really, thinks Nathan on the midnight lawn, how we cling to the concept of choice. It is quite clear to Nathan that Daniel is temperamentally disqualified from playing the Veil of Ignorance, because he is quite incapable of imagining a world in which he would not possess a superior and commanding intellect. Daniel knows that in any society he will rise towards the top, so why bother to play with the construction of a society in which there is no top? It is different for David D’Anger, for David, like Nathan himself, is an outsider. An ambitious outsider, living by his wits. His handicap, his blind spot, thinks Nathan, is that he cannot conceive of a society which does not have ambition as its driving force.

  Whereas I, thinks Nathan, staring at the nameless stars, I have given up all hope. Good brains I had and a good education, and what did I do with them? I tried to make a bit of money. I married Rosemary Palmer. I bad two children. I had affairs with other women. Not much to show for a life. And I’m the only one of us, it seems, who would jack it all in. To float free of all this, to begin again. So heavy we become, and so entrenched. Our feet are stuck in the clay. We are up to the knees, no, up to the waist, in the mud of the past. We have lived more than half our lives. There is no future. There are no choices left. It has all silted up around us. We are stuck in our own graves.

  And that mad old woman up on Exmoor, she is preparing for her own funeral. By all accounts she has left one mausoleum for another, and even now is stitching her own shroud. She is determined to make trouble to the end. One cannot but admire.

  Nathan is fascinated by the Palmer family and its history. He is fascinated by Frieda Haxby Palmer.

  David D’Anger is right, considers Nathan, to tease the Palmers about their complacency, about their confidence that they will always end up on the right side of any shift or redistribution of power. Yet that complacency comes from a source more mysterious than might at first appear. Seen from afar, the Palmers–Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary–might seem to carry the assumptions of the British middle classes, carried on from generation to generation. But they come from nowhere. They have turned themselves into members of the English middle class by sleight of hand. Their manner, their voice, their pretensions–they appear to date back for centuries, but, as Nathan knows quite well, they date back no further than Frieda Haxby Palmer and her missing husband, whoever he may have been. Nouveaux, that is what they are. But totally convincing. It is a mystery to Nathan. How have they managed it? David D’Anger’s family is distinguished, and Patsy’s is rich: David is of the expatriate intellectual Indian revolutionary aristocracy of Guyana, and Patsy is of comfortable Quaker stock. The Palmers are nobody, they have come from nowhere, but they look as though they have seized the reins of power. They look as though they have been born to this house, this garden, this tennis court. The D’Angers and the Herzes can never be British. They have the wrong genes, the wrong skin, the wrong noses.

  The Palmers spring from Frieda Haxby Palmer, the self-elected witch of Exmoor, the daughter of the Fens. A genetic freak of talent, intelligence or mother-wit had elevated her, and her children had slipped quietly up the ladder after her. Now she has gone mad, spun off into space, but they smile still from their perches like smug saints mounting a cathedral coping. As though they had always expected to be there, as though nothing short of revolution could dislodge them. And, as David D’Anger’s game had illustrated, that revolution will never come, or not in this millennium. What we have, we hold.

  Nathan knows he will have to go in and face yet another late-night discussion about Frieda. Loitering in the poisoned garden will not let him off. Nor does he wish to be spared. He is fond of Frieda, in his way, and like all the rest of them he finds her of obsessive interest. He will return to the kitchen, in the hope that the washing-up is over and the coffee and the brandy on the tray. He takes a final inhalation, as he makes his way back towards the house–he breathes the stink of the bitter cress, the Mermaid rose.

  In the kitchen, we find Patsy, covering cheese with cling-film. The kettle boils on the Aga, and there will be a choice of real coffee, unreal coffee, tea, herb tea. This, as Nathan likes to reflect, is the age of choice. Patsy is tired, and she has a busy day on Sunday–she has decided, masochistically she supposes, that she must attend the Quaker meeting, and then she has to rush back and provide lunch, not only for her house guests bu
t also for a neighbour or two. Why does she do it? God knows. She is tired, and Daniel too looks tired. She thinks he may drop dead of a heart attack. He works too hard. They both work too hard.

  The washing machine already purrs quietly, but David D’Anger is drying the crystal glasses, which must be done by hand, and wondering where Nathan has got to. Nathan always disappears when there is any housework to be done. Nathan is an old-fashioned bastard, thinks David, whereas David considers himself to be the New Man. There David stands, tea-towel in hand, the New Millennial Black British Man. He has, of course, another label–indeed, he has several others. He is an academic. He is a politician. He is a journalist. He appears on television. He is a parliamentary candidate for a marginal constituency in West Yorkshire, which he fully expects to win. He is the future. But he has astutely allied himself to the clan of the Palmers, which gives him added credibility. He is the coming man, and they will back him.

  You will never guess what Gogo does, when she is not being sister, wife, daughter, mother. I had better tell you. There she is, offering the carving dish for the dog to lick clean before she hands it to David at the sink. The dog licks and wags her tail gratefully. Gogo almost smiles at the dog and says, ‘Good girl’, in a superior but approving tone. She uses this tone to man, woman, child and beast. Gogo is a consultant neurologist at a hospital in Bloomsbury. That disapproving look comes from examining the slices of other people’s brains. She frightens her patients and her colleagues. She is an excellent wife for an aspiring politician. Had David D’Anger constructed her from a range of spare sample parts, he could never have come up with anything as convincing as this. She surpasses imagination. Nobody could have invented Gogo. Not even Nathan could have designed a Wife Image as plausible, as venerable, as alarming as Gogo. And she is only forty-two.

  Compared with Gogo, young Rosemary, who is forty, is a lightweight, though of course nobody dares to say so, for she takes herself very seriously, and after all she is a Palmer and English and a good deal more respectable in appearance and behaviour than her husband. You were warm when you thought she might be something to do with the media–she is the right generation to choose such a career, and unlike the others she looks as though she may have some sense of what is going on in the ephemeral world of fashion. She probably knows the names of designer clothes, and could tell you which restaurants are in vogue. She knows the language of the day. So you will not be surprised to hear that she is the Programme Co-ordinator for one of the largest arts complexes in the country. She is in charge of a large budget. Theatre, music, art and dance all bow and beg to her.

  So there you have them. The dishwasher churns on into a noisier mode, and Patsy puts the kettle upon the tray. Yes, there you have them–Daniel and Patsy Palmer, David and Gogo D’Anger, Nathan and Rosemary Hera–for Nathan has sneaked back in again, his fag ends in his pocket. (He extricates them and drops them, discreetly, into the wastebin–the wrong wastebin, for it is the one Patsy reserves for compost, but how is he to know?) The middle classes of England. Is there any hope whatsoever, or any fear, that anything will change? Would any of them wish for change? Given a choice between anything more serious than decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea, would they dare to choose? As Nathan had considered as he walked the lawn, they are all of them already, irrevocably, halfway up to their necks in the mud of the past of their own lives. Not even a mechanical digger could get them out alive now. There are no choices. The original position has been for ever lost.

  We have forgotten about Simon and Emily. Where have they gone? They have taken themselves off to the small sitting-room where they are watching a horrible video, one of Patsy’s specials. They find it entertaining, but not quite entertaining enough. They yawn. They had talked of having a play with Emily’s new computer game, Simcity, but although Emily is game to redesign her last fantasy conurbation, Simon seems to have lost interest. He never wants to concentrate on anything for long. He lacks perseverance.

  Simon is at Oxford, at one of the wealthier colleges, reading History, or so his family believe. Emily is still at school, in the sixth form, sitting her A-Levels, and after them, whatever her results, she will take a year off, and her first solitary trip abroad. Simon and Emily are only ankle-deep in their lives as yet. Perhaps not even that. But the mud pulls and sucks.

  The dog is called Jemima. She is an elderly, overweight Dalmatian. I don’t suppose you need to know that. I don’t suppose the Palmers need a dog. But they’ve got one.

  A family weekend in Hampshire. Tennis has been played. They all play, except for Nathan. And, despite all, at this late day, they still play to win.

  Timon hath made his everlasting mansion

  Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood...

  A faint blue line lies on the horizon. Frieda Haxby Palmer stares as it fades. The days are long. The light glimmers on the water. The moon is on the wane. And so is she. She has had her supper of tuna and brine. She lights another cigarette, coughs, refills her glass, and stares westwards. Is that a boat, far across the channel? She reaches for her binoculars. This is the smugglers’ coast.

  TIMON’S FEAST

  Meals less delicious than chicken with rosemary, meals even less delicious than tuna in brine with stale Ryvita, have been consumed on this summer evening in Britain. Up and down the country pre-packed foods, take-away foods, junk foods, fattening foods, slimming foods, ill-cooked foods have been devoured, messed with, rejected, spewed on to pavements and trampled into gutters. Does anybody actually starve? Is it necessary for anyone to dig around in wastebins amongst the fag ends? And if not, WHY DO THEY DO IT? Nobody really knows. Opinions range, but nobody really knows. Relative poverty, absolute poverty–these are shifting concepts, as are the conditions hidden behind phrases like ‘free range’ and ‘farm fresh’ and ‘corn fed’ and ‘free roaming’ and ‘fresh barn’. Does anybody really know anything? If we pulled away the veil, what would we see?

  In her prime Frieda Haxby Palmer had been good–uncomfortably good, but nevertheless good–at the lifting of the veil. She had been a professional asker of unpleasant questions. She had been admired and indeed honoured for this. But now she has gone mad. This is the opinion of her three children.

  In middle age, many women go mad. They are expected to. Frieda had survived her fifties triumphantly, only to crack up in her sixties. Is it a delayed menopause, Rosemary has wondered? Had Frieda been an early convert to Hormone Replacement Therapy, and is she now suffering from withdrawal symptoms?

  Over their decaffeinated coffee and herb tea, the Palmers, the Herzes and the D’Angers revert once more, repetitively, obsessively, to the subject of Frieda’s madness. They had seen it coming, they now claim, for some time, though none of them disputes that her last invitation to Romley had marked a new stage. That evening had been the end.

  But there had been a long trail of premonitions, which they now recall, discuss, recall. We must go back with them into the recent past, before we accept her final invitation and set off with her three children to the Mausoleum in Romley for the last supper.

  About two years ago Frieda, who had never smoked, or at least not to their knowledge, took up cigarettes. She was seen puffing away, and seen not only by them. She appeared, cigarette in hand, in public, on platforms, in photographs.

  This was not good. It was not fashionable. But when Daniel mildly raised the point, she declared that she had smoked a good deal as a girl, had given it up for years, and had now decided she would take to it again. She enjoyed it. It was no business of theirs, she implied. Who knows, maybe she was also snorting cocaine? They worried now that she would burn herself to death in bed, like Barbara Hepworth. Set that hotel on fire and blaze like a beacon, blaze across the water like Baldur on his death ship.

  She took up smoking, and she also took up the opera. In her earlier life she had shown little interest in music, but in her last year in London she was to be seen at the Royal Opera House, at the Coliseum, sometimes alone, sometimes
with a motley and expensive entourage. Late in the day, late in the century, she discovered Wagner; she even wrote a letter in defence of Wagner which was published in a newspaper. Her children, who knew that she knew nothing about Wagner, read it with suspicion. She might fool the editor of the Letters Page and a few thousand ignorant readers, but she did not fool them. They hoped she would not take up writing daily letters to the papers, though it was, they conceded, a cheaper pastime than smoking and the opera, and considerably cheaper than gambling, in which she also began to express an interest.

  Then there was the business with the car. Stuck in a traffic jam for twenty minutes one day in the West End (in Dover Street, to be precise, on her way to collect a painting from a gallery, for another of her new eccentricities had been the rash purchasing of art works), she had suddenly switched off her engine, got out and left the car there, in the solid, motionless traffic. Oddly, nobody had watched her leave. People do not notice middle-aged or elderly women. It was only when the traffic flow finally eased that her empty silver Saab was spotted there, driverless, abandoned, a ghost car. It created chaos. She had gone on to the gallery, picked up the painting and gone home in a taxi all the way to Romley. When questioned, she said she never wanted to see the car again. Finders keepers, she had offered. But it had come home to her like a pigeon, like a grey gull, and now it roosted whether she wanted it or not, nesting grimly at the sea’s edge– or so Rosemary claimed.