The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Benjamin was a rich and prolific dreamer. He dreamt that his grandmother Frieda was standing with him at the prow of a boat on an underground river. The river flowed rapidly through a dark tunnel. Frieda was holding high a banner that swirled in the wind.

  Benjamin had also been reading Coleridge, recommended by the librarian, who had become involved in his study of the West Country and the Matter of Exmoor. She recommended Kubla Khan. She assured him that both Coleridge and Wordsworth knew Exmoor well, which surprised Benjamin, but when he read the notes on Wordsworth’s Peter Bell he could see that she was right. (He did not think much of Peter Bell-a silly poem, about an old man and a donkey, not a patch on Kubla Khan–but nevertheless, the Valley of Rocks might be worth a visit?)

  It is not surprising that David and Gogo and the friendly librarian and Benjamin’s teachers at his local comprehensive were proud of the exemplary little lad. All knew that he would go far, and bent upon him the earnestness of their intentions and their hopes. An imaginative, hard-working child, he was well enough liked by his peer group; the worst they ever did to him was yell, ‘You’re a stiff and your mum’s a stiff!’ Or, more briefly and more unkindly, ‘Your Mum!’ (What this meant, Gogo never discovered.) Swimming was his favourite sport, and he could swim a length under water, but like his father he followed the cricket and loyally supported the West Indies he had never seen. He had plenty of friends, and though the tabled food in the D’Anger tea-time basement was on the healthy side, it was easy enough to smuggle in Snickers and crisps, cans of Coke and even bacon sandwiches. The tea-time minders turned a blind eye.

  In short, Benjamin D’Anger was a spoiled brat and a teacher’s pet. But so strong was the D’Anger charm, so formidable the stiff Haxby Palmer presence, and so generous the minders, that he was not resented.

  (One should not ignore, in this context, the influence of Grace D’Anger. The other parents knew it was good to keep on the right side of Gogo. If their brains suddenly snapped, if their parents's carted to dodder with Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s or encephalitis, if anyone in the family was struck down with motor neuron disease, Gogo was known to be your woman.)

  As the date of the excursion approached, Benjamin’s excitement mounted. One would have thought an outing to the West Country tame stuff for a child in the 1990s when 40 per cent of families from social classes A and B took two holidays or more a year and to parts of the world more exotic than Exmoor. (A slightly larger percentage of social classes D and E took no holidays at all but they need not concern us here.) David D’Anger himself was well aware of these statistics; more surprisingly, Benjamin D’Anger was aware of them too, for he took a keen interest in his father’s interests, and was very fond of statistics of social trends. A regular little John Stuart Mill, young Benjamin. (He had even tried to read Frieda Haxby’s classic, The Matriarchy of War, but had found it heavy going, you may be pleased to hear.) Benjamin was well aware that some of his own schoolmates had been to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Spain, the Canaries and Corsica; some of them had been to Disneyland. Others had never been further than the PC games shop, the arcade and the lido. He himself had been to Tuscany, Yugoslavia and France. Yet despite these travels, he was filled with an unusual and appropriately childish joy at the prospect of a week’s outing to Somerset and Devon. He crossed his fingers, muttered superstitiously to his private gods. He hoped that this time nothing would prevent or delay their departure. Let there be no crisis at the hospital, no excitement on the political horizon. This was a dull time of year. Let it stay dull. Let Benjamin have his holiday.

  They were to set off, for a week, at the beginning of September, and David and Gogo had written to Frieda at Ashcombe, saying that they would be in the neighbourhood and thought of dropping in to see her. She was to write to tell them if the particular day they had selected–they named it firmly, suggesting tea–was unsuitable. No answer was received.

  Much anxious family consultation took place before their departure. The Herzes had returned from their week on the Aegean, and the Daniel Palmers were stuck in Hampshire, entertaining a succession of house guests. Instructions and warnings were interchanged. Beware vipers, Rosemary repeated. Don’t forget to ask if she’s signed her German tax forms, urged Daniel.

  At last the D’Angers loaded themselves and their guidebooks into their family car and set off westwards along the M3. Merrily they bowled along on their adventures, like characters in an old-fashioned children’s story. Mummy, Daddy and Benjie. Benjie, from the back seat, assured Mummy and Daddy that he felt fine, and was not at all sick.

  Daddy, at the wheel, fell silent as they passed the pigs of Wiltshire in the sloping fields, rooting in the sunshine amidst the barracks of their curved corrugated huts. Wiltshire seemed full of pigs and soldiers. Lucky pigs, princely pigs. They could wander at will. David D’Anger wondered if he would forgive Frieda for dispatching him to the abattoir and the chicken gutters. The stench and tumbled carcasses remained with him. That had been what she had intended. The scrappy raw-pecked self-abusing fowl and stunned curly-headed bullocks haunted him, as did the pale girls in bloody overalls, the young men with dull eyes. The human factory farm. Pig skin, chopped gizzards, mechanically recovered meat. Cheap and nasty food for cheap people.

  Parliamentary candidate David D’Anger thought of his constituency of Middleton as he drove through Wiltshire. His future flock. It was a scattered constituency, of conservative dormitory villages straggling into Pennine farmland to the west, and to the east the dead and disowned villages of the coalfields, leaking red rust into brooks and rivers. Amongst the coalfields had risen the new hangars of Fast Food. Middleton itself was a nothing place, a small town without a heart. The Westerners never went near the old coalfields. Why should they? They drove past them at eighty miles an hour on the motorway. As he drove past these pigs. Nobody ever stopped to see. One world did not know that the other existed. And David D’Anger had been selected to woo, simultaneously, the Black-Asian vote (3.4 per cent and rising) and the middle-class Westerners. The way the polls were going, unless something unexpected happened (which, in politics, it always could) he is sure to be elected. Well, almost sure. Does he really want to be the Member of Parliament for Middleton?

  Like most men of politics, David D’Anger is not very good at taking a holiday and forgetting his work. He is not very good at emptying his head of social statistics. He had brought a lot of statistics with him in his suitcase. He had promised himself that he would try to enjoy the landscape and the company of his wife and son. But it was hard to concentrate on pre-history and Stonehenge. He and Gogo managed to reduce even Stonehenge to party politics, to Benjie’s irritation–Benjie had come to worship, and there his parents were, chattering on about the National Trust and English Heritage, about the Minister for the Arts, about motorways and the newly appointed and hubristically entitled Director of Stonehenge. What does she think she’s going to do, David and Gogo asked one another rhetorically–rearrange her troops in a more contemporary configuration, and order the noonday sun to shine upon a different dolmen? Benjie thought this was flippant, but perhaps it was no more flippant than the unsightly bunkers of public lavatories, the gift-shops, the tea-room selling Solstice Savories and Megalithic Rock Cakes.

  Benjamin tried to abstract himself from the temporal, the trivial. This was the heart of England. All around on the magic turf, amidst sheep and crows and dipping wagtails and flint-white molehills, against a swelling green backcloth of lumps and tumuli, small dramas were enacted. A party of smartly dressed middle-aged Japanese women strode purposefully onwards, their sensible neat polished shoes measuring the metres to the next point on their itinerary; they were trailed by their taxi-driver, a local Druid with long dirty yellow hair, dark glasses, faded jeans and a pink shirt. Two travellers from the New Age sat facing the stones, at some distance, upon an embroidered mat: their eyes were shut, their noses were pierced, their foreheads were bound with embroidered fillets, and their legs were gartered with
straps of blue leather. They moved their lips in silent prayer. A fat white baby crowed in delight from its pushchair, and a solitary MidWestern Wordsworth scholar with a backpack opened a pocket edition and read to himself from Guilt and Sorrow. An elegant Indian in a green and gold sari seemed to cross herself as the slight wind ruffled her hem and her long hair. A young woman with flowing red Viking hair knelt at the feet of a dark bearded monkish figure and kissed his hand as tears poured down her pale cheeks. Benjamin gazed at these devotional multicultural figures in the Wiltshire landscape.

  His interest in Wookey Hole was if anything more intense, and as they drove on, after an unduly protracted pub lunch (how odd of Gogo to order Scampi and Chips in a Basket, she really must think she was on her hols!), he realized that it was going to be a near thing. They had already decided to skip Cheddar Gorge and take it in on the way home (he’d heard that kind of promise before), but Wookey Hole was still on the itinerary. Now it too began to look at risk. Would it close before they got there? Were his parents already tired of sight-seeing? He feared they were about to betray him by deciding to drive straight on to their pre-booked country hotel for a tedious pre-dinner drink. He kept his eye on the car’s clock, and managed by secret map-reading and tactful intervention to prevent them from taking a wrong turn near Shepton Mallet. He got them on course again, and urged them on. They were still in plenty of time in his view, but suppose they turned nasty at the last moment?

  His heart sank as they emerged from miles of slow narrow minor road and saw the Wookey Hole car park. This was not promising. It was vast, ugly, multilayered and crowded. Gogo groaned, and David said, ‘Oh dear.' Wookey Hole was clearly a Fun Spot for the Masses, almost as downmarket and repellent as Disneyland. The car clock told them it was already 4.08. Benjamin knew his parents would try to wriggle out of their commitment. ‘There’s a space!’ he cried eagerly, as he saw a tin-green Datsun reverse from the ranks on the tarmac. 4.09 said the clock. David hesitated, and took the metallic Datsun’s place.

  It was a long walk to the cute fake stone shop that sold tickets, and there was a queue. The next tour was not until 4.30, and the D’Angers were informed it would take an hour and a half. Could Benjamin persuade his parents to hang around for twenty unattractive minutes in order to join an uncongenial throng and walk into the floodlit bowels of the hill, chaperoned by a talkative guide? He put on an expression of stubborn pleading and willed them not to retreat. He wanted to see the inside of the Mendips.

  Gogo was for cutting their losses and for moving on, but David, fortunately, had decided to take a sociological interest in their fellow visitors, in their group dynamic. He discovered that the visit to the caves in fact took only half an hour; the rest of the tour was optional. They weren’t obliged to traipse round the paper mill and the fim-fair. They’d be out and away by five, in plenty of time for a hot bath before dinner. Benjamin’s will prevailed. He coerced and chivvied his reluctant parents across the road, along the path up the hillside, past the flowing stream and the hyena lair, beneath the hanging wood, and marched them to the iron turnstile with their tickets in their hands. (It was, complained Gogo, expensive: an exploited cave, a marketed hillside. Who owned it? It was not clear. Who owns the bowels of the earth?)

  Like docile prisoners they waited, like prisoners they allowed themselves to be ticked off and lined up and filed into the cold and dripping darkness. Benjamin tried not to listen to the guide, who was utterly banal; he tried to concentrate on the hanging horseshoe bats, the exotic tropical hart’s tongues, the yellow folds of the limestone. They moved from chamber to chamber as the guide described the Witch of Wookey Hole, who had lived here with her little dog and brought ill-luck to the land: look, there she was, frozen to stone by a monk from Glastonbury, and there was her little dog, and there was her alabaster witch’s ball.

  The silver Axe flowed silently and very fast, without a ripple to disturb its surface. It was hundreds of feet deep. The stalactites and stalagmites were elaborate, magnificent: they hung in carved amber and ivory curtains, stained here and there with vermilion, ochre and sooty black. They were fretted stone in a cathedral. (A poet called Alexander Pope had stolen some of them for his grotto, the guide informed them.) The hillside above them weighed billions of tons, and nobody knew why the roofs of the chambers did not collapse. Nobody knew how deep the water was. The guide described the green underwater world discovered by divers, and the muddy Cave of Gloom beyond Chamber 24. He recounted that the divers had found another chamber, a twenty-fifth chamber, but beyond that none had ever penetrated. Beyond that was a dive into ‘the bottomless void’. Two hundred feet down the abyss ‘one brave man’ had plunged, but had returned, leaving the mystery unsolved. What lay beyond, in the heart of the mountain? What caverns, what lakes, what waterfalls, and what abiding spectres? Benjamin was deeply impressed. The unknown called to him, the depths invited him. He was enchanted and afraid.

  He was less enchanted by the paper mill, which his parents rushed him through at some speed, pausing only to read out to one another the optimistic Heritage version of the past presented by the Brochure (‘It is silent now, the great rag boiler. The benches are empty where the aproned girls chattered and giggled while their nimble fingers shredded the bundles of rags, cutting away buttons and hoods and lengths of whalebone ...’) Benjamin was not interested in whether they had chattered or wept, whether they had shredded bundles of rags or their own fingers; he paid little attention as Gogo, her resistance subdued by marketing, underground imprisonment and oxygen deprivation, succumbed to buying some hand-crafted indigo-blue envelopes made from recycled denim. (They were very deceptively packaged, so Gogo discovered, not to her surprise, when she tried to use one three months later.) Benjamin was not interested in all this. He walked through the fun-fair and the Magical Mirror Maze in a daze, thinking of the one brave man who had plunged and returned. This old-fashioned stuff, these hurdy-gurdies and carved horses and penny-in-the-slot machines meant nothing to him, nor, he could see, did they arouse much nostalgia in his parents. ‘The whole outfit seems to belong to Madame Tussaud’s and Pearson’ he heard them muttering to one another, as they tried to find an exit through the Maze and the fountains and the arcades. It was not easy to get out. ‘The bottomless void,’ he repeated to himself. ‘The Cave of Gloom.’

  The young woman at the reception desk did a double-take on David D’Anger. He was used to this, but her response was innocent and unconcealed. She received him at first with a slightly hostile suspicion (Indian chap), then with deference (hadn’t she seen him on TV?). She clearly couldn’t work out whether she recognized him or not (he suspected, as a practised sociologist, that she might be the type to have endured ten minutes or so of Question Time or News night or Race Watch, just long enough for his features but not his name to register), but she decided to treat him as a celebrity,just in case. And after that, it was plain sailing. He employed the D’Anger charm, she called for a porter, blushed, assured him that she was giving him the room with the best view, and asked if he and his wife would like a cup of tea. Then she shimmered, in a slightly flustered way, at Benjamin, who was carrying a suitcase and a large canvas bag of books and maps and papers.

  She was a pretty young woman, with fair hair, a tilted nose, a fair creamy skin, full lips and a visible bosom. She wore a crisp longsleeved white blouse over a black skirt, belted with a black leather, gold-buckled belt. An English rose. Her name, she informed them, was Felicity, and she was there to help them in any way she could. She blushed again as she spoke. Would they like to book a table for dinner? Would the young man be dining with them? They would find a minibar in Room 12, though not in the young man’s room (Room 14) next door. Which newspaper would they like in the morning?

  Gogo watched this little comedy from a distance. She never interfered with David’s conquests. And the girl was a harmless girl, a country–county girl. Not like those sharp-toothed metropolitan vampires at the studio, those ambitious little graduate po
liticos who offered their sexual services as research assistants. David’s vanity deserved appeasement. Let him have it. She could no longer give what he needed.

  And in bed that night, as David turned to her, as he now so rarely did, she tried not to turn away. She held him to her. She loved him, for what that was worth, but she was no wife to him. She did not want to lose him, but how could she keep him? Childbirth had traumatized her. She thought of her mother, as David sadly embraced and caressed and entered her, and wondered how Frieda had broken away into freedom. She remembered her grandmother, that sour old bag in Chapel Street, that endless talker, that killjoy: was she herself a killjoy now? Sex did not interest her. She had chosen the head, the brain, the nervous system. An ancestral puritan rural deadness had flattened and unsexed her. She suspected that neither her brother nor her sister was much interested in sex. They preferred status, money, power. How had Frieda Haxby managed to break away and run off with so many ill-assorted men? Or had they been, as Daniel sometimes hinted, a cover? For status, money, power?

  Gogo knew that she had done David a great wrong, through love of him. She had loved him so much that she had been unable to refuse his formal proposal of marriage. But for his own sake she should have denied him. Now they were bound to one another for ever by that child sleeping in the next room. Gogo believed that her husband had once loved her. She hoped that he was unfaithful to her, for if he were not, how hard his life must be. She hoped that David had not killed in himself all the natural man. He too had chosen the head, but his body, unlike hers, could still speak. How could he remain with her? Should she not forgo him for his own good? What was this loyalty that kept him by her side?