The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Well, she had escaped from Dry Bendish to the sea’s edge and this deluge. Will the rain never stop? It cannot, she thinks, pour down so heavily for much longer. All the waters of the western sky have gathered over the high wet land of the moor and have been sucked down to discharge themselves upon its black bosom and upon its upland bogs, upon its clefts and gullies. There is some movement in the darkness and it must lighten soon. Yet still the force of the downpour makes the great drops splash and break on the cracked paving. They rise again into little round fountains, some inches high.

  She and her sister Hilda had called these special effects of deluge ‘fairy fountains’. No, she corrects herself, not fairy fountains. ‘Fairy crowns’. Little coronets of rain-pearls and rain-diamonds. Such an imagination, Hilda had had. That is what the adults used to say.

  Can she nail Vampire Hilda, can she drive a stake through her undead greedy pulsing heart?

  What can Frieda care for reputation? The last infirmity of noble minds. She is past all that, beyond, washed up. This at least even the utterly self-centred Rosemary must have observed. Why bother to set right the record for those one despises? Let them sink in their own mire. And sink they will, in the sucking mud of meatless burgers, drifting garbage, false coinage, hot vomit, corruption, greed, triviality. Scrambling for lottery tickets, selling one another bad dreams and ersatz merchandise and junk talk and fake labels. Sometimes Frieda thinks it is what they have done to the language itself that has driven her out of reach of her fellow countrymen and women. She had never considered herself a warrior in the battle for pure English, not wishing to ally herself with the High Anglicans, old-fashioned novelists, Oxbridge pedants, failed publishers and sacked editors whom that cause seemed to attract, but of late her recoil from what she heard over the airwaves, what she read in the press, what she received through the post had become so violent that she had found herself moving towards their ranks. Better here alone than make common cause with such dubious friends. There are no common causes left. Each for herself alone.

  In her last days at Romley she had listened to the sounds of the city, to the wailing and bleeping of grief and pain and crime, to the waves of the sky vibrating with jumbo and chopper, to the ground beneath her house rumbling with tube and tunnel and drill and screw. And from the radio had spewed words that no sane society could ever coin. Offwat, Offtel, Offsted, Offthis, Offthat. Everything had gone Off, like bad meat. How had these sounds globbed up from the pure well of language undefiled into the tongue that Shakespeare spoke? Even her local library now labels books as Goo and foo, as ROM and his and pap. Gristle, fat, chicken scraps and water from cows’ heads. The Trading Standards chief in Taunton had told her that the chicken carcasses are put in a huge metal container and pressurized until the tatters of flesh left on the bones begin to melt and flow. This excretion is squeezed through the machine’s orifices, collected, reconstituted. This we devour, GOO, FEE, FI, FO, FUM. Our great post-war civilization.

  Once–indeed, only yesterday–this rotting world had fascinated her, and she had done her best to investigate it, to squeeze it till it flowed. But something has snapped in her. So here she sits, a queen in abdication, a queen in exile, a queen at the water’s edge, an old woman with bad teeth and a weak bladder. They will not ask her back and she does not care. She has had her time. The wells are poisoned now. Even here, the poison seeps. It flows down the channel from the nuclear-power station, and the fishermen catch dogfish with two heads, mackerel that grow legs, lobsters that glow in the dark. Or so they say in the Wreckers’ Arms.

  She can see the far northern shore, for the air is clearing now. Across the channel in earlier centuries came Welsh coal for the lime kilns of this acid earth, and from the west came contraband from further afield–wines, lace, brandy, decorated steel blades from Toledo. The illegal trade continues, for today bales of marijuana are washed up on the beach. On fine days Frieda can see the pillar of smoke and the plume of flame and the giant’s building blocks and towers of the steel-factory-turned-chemical-plant of Aberary. It rises like an enchanted palace. At night yellow lights bead the shore, and the single white eye of the sleepless lighthouse blinks. Freighters and tankers slowly pass. She watches them through her binoculars. She can see further now than when she was younger. She needs glasses to read, but her long vision improves. She does not always like what she sees.

  She does not miss London. She does not miss company. She has had too much company. Her early years had been too thin and clear, too static, too flat, and to escape them she had thrown herself into turbulence, as soon as her children released her–and somewhat sooner, in their view. Her middle age had been restless, it had whirled her from project to project, from continent to continent, from bed to bed. Now she wishes to be alone.

  Her feet are warmer now. She looks at them with muted favour. She has an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of her right foot which has troubled her all her life. She can see that if she survives into an advanced old age it will become a problem. On her left leg she has a large scar, which she now examines with interest, for it occurs to her that it is one of the few visible messages preserved from her girlhood. It dates from the day that her sister Everhilda Haxby had tried to kill her. Although much faded, it is still prominent. For years she had entered it in her many paged, richly stamped passports and in other documents, under sections headed ‘Special Features’ or ‘Distinguishing Characteristics’, until she had realized in the early 1980s that in these days of black boxes and instant incineration a scar, however historic and impressive, would not survive death. She had then taken to entering her dental bridgework. But not many countries ask for such details these days. We are all on computer, or expendable: who can tell which?

  (On one of her academic jaunts abroad, in the 1960s, she had woken from heavy sleep to find her lover departed and her passport lying on the hotel bedside table, defaced: he had added to the admitted distinguishing feature of her thigh-scar, in indelible biro, the additional qualities of ‘PARANOIA AND INTRANSIGENCE’.)

  The scar is important to Frieda. It will appear in her memoirs. It marks the day when Hilda Haxby had tried to kill her little sister Frieda in the old mill by the river.

  Frieda now accepts this attempted murder as a fact. She would stand up for it in a court of law. She has forgotten that this interpretation of that long-long-ago incident is very recent. It had come upon her when she was in her forties, and then only at the prompting of an analyst. The analyst had not been analysing Frieda Haxby: they had met quite by chance at a private view of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Warming white wine in hand, crumbling puff pastry dusting their suit jackets, they had been speaking of sibling slaughter, a topic prompted by portraits of Bloody Mary, Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots. Bloody Mary, her round cheeks girlish and smug, grimly and firmly clutches a rose and a pair of gloves; Lady Jane nervously fingers her own fingers; Scottish Mary rests her hand beneath her right breast above her rosary; and victorious Elizabeth Gloriana dazzles in many poses with ruff and fan and jewels and brocade. Rivalries, hatreds, treacheries gleam from their stiff bodices, their hard bold eyes. And as the analyst spoke of the murderous passions engendered by heritage and court, it became clear to Frieda, in one of those flashes that come only once or twice in a lifetime, that the ladder had not shaken of its own accord. Hilda had tried to kill her, and all had followed on from that.

  ‘What do you think, bird?’ Frieda asks the pigeon. It rattles its saucepan lid in response, and cocks its head at her with a look of pure questioning intelligence. She gazes at it with affection. Its red-rimmed eyes pierce, its iridescent blue-green bright breast feathers gleam. Like the dog, Bounce, it has adopted her. At first she tried to chase it away, following her London-dweller’s instinctive dislike of this verminous and greedy species, but the bird had persisted, retreating from her waving arms only to advance yet again and again, until she let it into her house, to sit with her. She admires it, she is s
orry she tried to reject it. It is slightly lame, and had flown in with a message on its leg. She does not think the message is for her, and does not know how to open the little capsule. Let it keep its message, the message can wait. Now she and the bird are friends. It is brighter than Bounce. It likes to sit in the saucepan lid. She does not know why. Perhaps it reminds it of something in its former life.

  Her own former life lies around her in untidy profusion. She must make a thorough search, one of these days, for her parents’ marriage certificate. She is sure she had seen it once, amidst the debris she had carried with her from the cottage after her mother’s death. She had made only the most desultory attempt to trace her own ancestry through birth and death certificates at St Catherine’s House on the Aldwych, for the atmosphere of the building had appalled her–had such places been as disagreeable as this in the old days, when she had worked at Somerset House herself, before she had been able to delegate such tedious work to research assistants? The smell of anoraks and damp jerseys, the slamming of heavy ledgers, the jostling and poking, the muttered consultations, the crush, the queues, the discomfort, the despair. Every twenty minutes the inevitability of theft had been ritually proclaimed. What could these poor wretches have that would be worth the stealing? Who would want their plastic bags and their stubby umbrellas? Their miserable plough-pushing grandparents, their unmarried mothers?

  The sight of her own name in the ledger had made her feel slightly sick. Born at 56 Chapel Street, Dry Bendish. Looking for her sister Everhilda and her mother Gladys had been more than she could face. She had chickened out and run away. She would write a record without records. Her last testament.

  She will stick it out here. Maybe they will try to come and get her, those devoted children of hers, and carry her off in a straitjacket. Certify her, section her, lock her up and feed her by force. She must patrol her defences, when the rain clears.

  Let us return to Hampshire, for it is still wet on Exmoor, and Frieda, although she has been an adventuress in her time, has become a bit of a bore. She does nothing but brood balefully on the past. She dreams too much, and takes her dreams too seriously. She is not good company. She makes little effort to entertain. Her mother and her sister are dead, but she will not let them rest in their graves. There is no reason why we should watch with her. We can take her in small doses. We will leave her by her paraffin stove amidst the paraphernalia of her necromantic arts, as the deluge gutters and dies, as she wonders whether to go down at low tide to hammer some radioactive mussels and winkles from the rocks of the shore for her evening meal. No wonder she is losing weight. But she likes mussels, and is happy to gleam, phosphorescent, into what is left of eternity.

  We will go back to Hampshire, and see what has happened at the Old Farm. We will be more welcome there.

  It is now the Sunday afternoon of that same long weekend, and the little cousins, Jessica, Jonathan and Benjamin, are upstairs, packing up the Game. They have been bleary-eyed all day, for they had played for four hours the night before; Benjamin had been on super-inventive form. It had been almost too exciting. When will they have a chance to play again? There has been some talk about a joint family holiday in a borrowed house in Italy in early September, but the children do not think it will come to anything. And anyway, the Game belongs here, in Emily’s wardrobe. The children are accustomed to their parents pretending to make plans, then doing nothing about them. This summer, the Herzes are off for a week’s cruise of the Aegean, leaving their children in Golders Green with their good grandmother; the D’Angers are too busy to get away; the Palmers will be staying in Hampshire through August. Their best bet for a reunion, the little cousins guess, is another crisis over Grandma Frieda. A second crisis would reconvene them.

  They wrap the little riflemen and toy animals in soft cotton squares from Patsy’s abandoned patchwork quilting, and lay them in their boxes, tenderly. They hope that something awful happens soon, to bring them all together again. Jon and Jess sense that if too much time passes, Ben will outgrow the Game, and then they will never discover its meaning, its dreadful, its unimaginably thrilling climax.

  David and Gogo also pack their weekend bags, and strip their pillowcases from their pillows. They are good guests. Rosemary and Nathan, as they pack more messily in the bedroom over the corridor, argue about whether it has been a good idea to delegate the next visit to Exmoor to David and Gogo. Will they drive down and purloin the family silver, the family secrets?

  Rosemary has not recovered from her own sense of shock, and is hurt that the others do not take it seriously. It was partly for their sake that she had made the journey, now all they can do is mock.

  Th ey gather downstairs, say their farewells. The Herzes are giving Simon Palmer a lift to London, and he climbs into the back of their car with Jon and Jess. Daniel has returned from driving the Partingtons home; Daniel follows the can along the gravel drive, across the cattle grid. He is taking Jemima for a walk. As he walks, in the summer evening, he thinks about cultural appropriation. The concept sets his teeth on edge. So does the notion of the Veil of Ignorance. It strikes him, as he walks, that David D’Anger is a shocking fraud. A hypocrite, a pretender. Hidden behind seven veils of academic obfuscation, cultural plausibility and good intentions. An intruder, a thief in the night. Daniel is slightly surprised to find himself thinking these intolerant thoughts. What can David tiave said to irritate him so much? He slows down, pauses, stands still, as the old spotty bitch squats by the path. Can there be any threat to him, in anything David D’Anger has; said? No, surely not.

  And perhaps that is enough, for the moment, of domestic friction. Let us widen the circle. We need a new character. It is time to introduce the man from the attic, the man from the garden shed.

  The man from the attic has emerged from hiding, and now he is sitting at the kitchen dining-table, shelling broad beans. Patsy is blanching and freezing them. There is a glut. He squeezes the pods, and takes out the plump, pale-green embryos from their silvery furred sheaths. He places them in a pudding bowl and drops the pods, already blackening, into a basket on the floor.

  His name is Will Paine, and we have not met him before because he is shy. It is as simple as that. Patsy would include Will in family meals, she would happily (indeed with malicious pleasure) force him upon the attention of His Honour Judge Partington, but Will Paine is shy, and she respects his reluctance to be shown off. It is a pity that he would not meet David D’Anger, for David would surely have found him of sociological interest, but there you are: you can’t control everything, even if you have the righteous confidence of a Patsy Palmer.

  Patsy and Will Paine met in Winchester Gaol, where Will was serving a sentence for peddling grass to the middle classes of Stoke Newington. Patsy had found out all about it, and had been shocked on his behalf. The sentence had seemed excessive for so small a crime, and very unlikely to do him or anyone any good at all. Will is not, Patsy maintains, the criminal type. He is a lost boy, looking for a good cause.

  He is half-coloured. He says his father is a Jamaican, and Patsy assumes he is telling the truth. (He is.) He says he comes from Wolverhampton, and here he cannot be lying, for his accent bears witness to his honesty. His mother now works in Bilston, in a factory that makes cot mattresses. She had, when Will was a baby, worked as an office cleaner.

  Will is thin, slightly framed, and pretty. His smile is hopeful, his long neck bare and tender. He wears an earring and his hair is close cropped, sitting neatly on his finely sculpted skull. His skin is palish brown, shades lighter than David D’Anger’s: he could almost pass for white, were it not for something deliberately exotic in his manner, a cultivated elegance suggestive of the West Indies he has never visited. Frankly, to be blunt about it, he is too nice-looking to be pure-bred English. The pure-bred English are a motley, mottled, mongrel ugly breed, blotched with all the wrong pigments, with hair that does not do much for them at all. The English are clumsy and gross and at the same time runtish. They do n
ot make the best of themselves. Their bodies are thick, their faces either pinched and beaky like mean birds or shapeless as potatoes. Will Paine is a beautiful hybrid, grafted on to old stock. Both his mother and his father are large (his father, now returned to Jamaica, an eighteen-stone bathroom-scale-crushing dashing desperado, his mother sad and spreading from pie and chips and hot sweet tea). Will Paine is slender like an athlete, like a dancer. He is a mystic and he believes in vegetables and stars and cosmic correspondences. Even now he is explaining to Patsy Palmer the properties of the broad bean, which signifies, he assures her, prosperity in the sign of the water-carrier, good health to the liver, and nourishment for the left-hand side of the brain.

  ‘You see the way they grow,’ he says, showing her the little white spriglet at the bottom of the cleft of the swollen seam, ‘they turn to the left, when they grow. They reach to the light, but the leaves always turn to the left.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ says Patsy, who does not believe in humouring the dotty, even when they happen to be ex-convicts under her own protection.

  ‘No, not really,’ says Will, smiling disarmingly. ‘It’s what I read in this book.’ His smile is crooked, charming. His front teeth are both slightly chipped, evenly chipped, giving him a sharp, elfin look.

  He recants so quickly that Patsy recants too. ‘You may be right,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten all I ever knew about photosynthesis and the climbing habits of plants. We used to grow beans in jars with blotting paper. I don’t suppose they do that kind of thing at school now. It’s all computers now.’ She sighs for innocence lost.

  Will frowns, and continues to pod on. He is puzzled by Patsy, who seems to him to be a mass of contradictions. Here she is, like a good housewife, a good earth mother, freezing vegetables for the winter nights, vegetables which she has grown in her own garden and fed with her own compost. (She gets very little help, as far as he can see, from the aged once-a-week gardener.) Here she is sighing nostalgically about her innocent schooldays. And yet she lets her own children get away with murder. Will Paine wonders if Patsy has any idea of what Simon gets up to in his parents’ absence? Will, who is now trying to go straight, would always have drawn the line at some of it–asking for trouble, the road to hell. Will has seen it all and he knows. Simon is a mad boy, a lost cause. Patsy does not even notice. And it’s not only the drug scene. The stuff she lets them watch, those videos she has lying around all over the house. She must know what’s in those nasty little black boxes, because she watches it herself. Doesn’t it cross her mind that it might not be good for people to watch that kind of shit? Simon and Emily are her own children, and he supposes it’s her business if she wants to let them deprave themselves, but he’d been shocked to see that she’d left it all lying around when those other little kids came for the weekend. Luckily they hadn’t seemed interested, or he might have tried sneaking the worst of them out of their way, up to the attic. He couldn’t sit through that junk himself. No way. It makes him feel faint. The sight of blood, the body parts, the meat.