The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  So one day the little girl said to the stranger child, ‘Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?’

  ***

  Frankly, thought Frieda, panting slightly and pausing to cough as she climbed the last short steep flight of steps to the terrace, you could tell the story any old way, as long as you left out most of the circumstantial details. And she’s forgotten most of those, as it had all happened so very long ago. But however you told it, you always ended up at the old mill. And after the old mill, the disputed prince.

  She could remember the walk to the mill well enough. It had been an August day, one of those interminable days when summer holidays lengthened into tedium, when cabbage leaves turned yellow and fell from their scarred stalks, when wasp-eaten apples dropped to rot in the grass, when village boys clustered behind hedges pulling legs from daddy-long-legs or smoking furtive cigarettes. Much of the summer, Hilda and Frieda frowsted indoors, reading library books, for they were not encouraged to play with the village children, and therefore they were despised by the village children. Gladys, true to her roots rather than to her education and her adopted class, made no effort to entertain her daughters. They bored her and she bored them. The hopeful child’s cry of ‘What can we do today?’ had long been silenced, and sullen, resentful, the girls skulked and sulked. The father saw, and was sorry, and was powerless.

  Gladys Haxby had been obliged to give up her job when she was married. That was the law in those days. Married women did not teach in schools. Or not in peacetime.

  Three bored women in one small cottage, making the worst of their lives, while Ernie Haxby worked in the fields or at the farm.

  And then, one hot day, Hilda had said to Frieda, ‘Shall we go for a walk, down by the river?’

  Frieda had brightened, like a puppy hearing its lead rattle. She was ready, she was waiting.

  They had walked through the village, past the Wheatsheaf and the Post Office and Caney’s General Store, down Church Street, and through the churchyard to the lane which led to the river. They knew the churchyard well, although the Haxbys and the Buggs had been chapel. They knew the tombstones, and Hilda had woven stories about the old table tomb which was coining apart at its stone seams. In it lay bones, and worse than bones–virgins buried alive, with their hearts still beating; old men whose hair grew after death to cloak their bodies with a silver caul; babies strangled by their child-mothers at birth. But now the sisters were too old for that kind of nonsense. Even the dead bored them.

  They had plodded along the dry path at the edge of the yellow field towards the river and the mill. Frieda had trotted obediently behind. And they had reached the line of pollarded willows that marked the river, and the bridge by the derelict mill.

  Their father had once worked at the mill, humping sacks of grain, in its working days. He was a casual labourer, at the beck and call. But now the mill was abandoned, for the river level had fallen. It stood empty. The slatted wooden wheel was still. Their father worked the beet fields.

  The mill yard had been turned into an agricultural dump. Old machinery rusted and weeds sprouted. The sisters had often stood there, on the bridge by the river, but they had never entered the mill. But now Frieda followed Hilda on to its forbidden ground, and edged her way through the broken door, and breathed in the white dust. They heard scufflings, vanishings. And they had looked at the ladder. It mounted to the next floor, from which in the olden days, five years ago, the grain was heaved down the chute. And Hilda had said, ‘I dare you.’

  And Frieda had climbed at Hilda’s command, but Hilda had not followed. And then Frieda had been frightened to come down. Coming down was worse than going up. Down she had clambered, over uncertain rungs, past rusty protruding nails, and as she came down, the ladder had begun to shake and tremble. And Frieda had fallen, and in falling she had gashed her leg. It had bled and bled. And Hilda had run off and left her there, and Frieda had limped home, her leg bandaged by a dirty handkerchief, to her mother’s certain wrath.

  The wound had healed badly, and Frieda had been ill. And her father had made her the animals.

  ***

  Hilda was dead, and Frieda was alive, with a scar on her thigh. So what did it matter, how it all had happened? What did it matter if there was no true story?

  ‘I look to the past because I cannot see the future,’ said Frieda aloud, dramatically, to an unseen audience, as she stood upon the terrace, fronting the sea. She fingered the grey stone ivy-bound urn upon the parapet wall, started to pluck at the tenacious white worm roots, the thicker strangle-hold of hairy tentacles. She had meant to replant these urns, but maybe she wouldn’t bother.

  Once upon a time, and once upon a time. Fairy stories were all the fashion these days, she gathered. Feminist fairy stories, oriental fairy stories. She hadn’t kept up. She was out of date. She belonged to another kind of past, a bruising, grim, spartan, wartime, post-war, heavy-weight past. This was the time in which she had earned her laurels. She’d read her Bettelheim, long ago, but she’d lost interest. Anyway, how could you have a character called Gladys Bugg in a fairy story? Everhilda, yes, but Gladys, certainly not!

  A couple of years ago, in Monte Carlo, she’d met a writer of romantic fiction, who wrote under the name of Amantha Knight. Her real name was Susan Stokes. She was very fat and very rich. Over a White Lady they had compared their losses at the tables, and discussed the forging of names, the writing of fiction. Was one influenced by names? Both thought it probable. Frieda Haxby, Frieda pointed out, was a brutal sort of name, a fierce name, a hammer of a name. Susan Stokes sounded, Miss Stokes considered, very plebeian–‘which, of course,’ she conceded, ‘I am.’ It gave Miss Stokes pleasure to invent romantic, alternative names for her characters, to give them romantic, alternative destinies. Although, as she pointed out to Frieda, there were only two plots to choose from. One was Sleeping Beauty, the puberty myth. The other was Cinderella, the tale of Rags to Riches. All romantic fiction, according to Miss Stokes, was a variant on these two themes. Sometimes she wrote one, sometimes the other. Nobody ever got tired of them.

  Frieda had granted that she had a point. She hadn’t thought about it much since, until, during her removal, she came across the Arthur Rackham volume which she had borrowed or purloined from her sister. She had reread the stories with curiosity, still puzzled fifty years later by their fractures and caesuras, their banalities and brutalities. A primitive folk mind, forcing all experience into a primitive mould? She had tried to break free, to create new stereotypes, to discover new patterns in the past. Yet what was her own tale but the tale of Cinderella? From Rags to Riches had been her story, as it had been the story of stout Miss Stokes.

  She and Miss Stokes had agreed that they were rich enough to retire, to live at leisure. (Miss Stokes had a house in Jersey, and another in Tenerife.) Yet they did not wish to retire. ‘Boredom is my bugbear,’ confessed Miss Stokes, waving at the waiter. ‘I get bored when I’m not working. What about you?’

  So on one went, but to what end? Frieda would never attend another conference, never give another lecture, never harass another politician or engage battle with another journalist or historian. They weren’t worth her attention. Really, on balance, she was very disappointed in evolution. It didn’t seem to speed up at all. It seemed to have got stuck. Evolution had broken its appointment with the human race. Or maybe it was the other way round.

  The ivy smelt sour on her fingers. She wiped her fingers on her skirt. Woodlice scuttled, dislodged. She had hung her ballgown back in the damp beetle-bored wardrobe. She had enjoyed its airing, had enjoyed the shock on the faces of Grace, David, Benjamin. Once she had glittered, once she had been fine. She had turned heads, made headlines. And what was there to show for it now? A dress hanging from a brass rail.

  ‘I look to the past because I have no future,’ said Frieda Haxby.

  Frieda Haxby had never been a comfortable woman. She’d never had much truck with comfort, and she didn’t see why she should sta
rt to seek it now.

  On I December 1788, Schiller wrote to his friend Korner, when the latter complained that he was not being very productive: ‘The ground for your complaint seems to me to lie in the constraint imposed by your reason upon your imagination ... It seems a bad thing and detrimental to the creative work of the mind if Reason makes too close an examination of the ideas as they come pouring in–at the very gateway, as it were. Looked at in isolation, a thought may seem very trivial or very fantastic; but it may be made important by another thought that comes after it, and, in conjunction with other thoughts that may seem equally absurd, it may turn out to form a most effective link. Reason cannot form any opinion upon all this unless it retains the thought long enough to look at it in connection with others ... where there is a creative mind, Reason, so it seems to me, relaxes its watch upon the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it look them through and examine them in a mass. You critics are ashamed or frightened of the momentary and transient extravagances which are found in creative minds, and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. You complain of unfruitfulness because you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.’

  Just over two hundred years later, Benjamin D’Anger sent a postcard to his friend Ronjon de Lanerolle. The postcard showed a view of a dark brown mountainous moorland, beneath stormy clouds, lit by an improbably lurid and fulgent sky; it was entitled ‘The Beast of Exmoor’ and informed the purchaser that high on Exmoor there had been many dramatic and frightening attacks on farm animals, far more ferocious than those made by foxes or wild dogs, and that the savagery had lasted for several years...‘it was hoped that the animal would eventually die of old age, but last year brought new reports of mysterious killings 50 perhaps the original animal has found a mate!’ To this message Benjamin added his own: ‘Sorry I couldn’t get a snap of the Beast. Saw some great stags today. See you next week. Cheers, Ben.’

  STEPPING WESTWARD

  David and Patsy Palmer, Rosemary and Nathan Herz were not pleased with the report of the D’Angers. Not only were they not pleased: they were suspicious. It had been unwise of them to encourage the D’Angers to go to Ashcombe. The D’Angers had stitched up some deal there. They had fixed Frieda’s will, and put their markers on her treasures. David D’Anger had played his black card, out in white Somerset, and trumped their red. Perverse Frieda, mad Frieda, foolish Frieda. And they themselves had not been wise. They should have taken the warning of Timon’s feast more seriously. She had showed her weakness then, in those green peas, in that sweet sugar talk. David D’Anger had seduced Frieda, as he had seduced their sister Gogo. Frieda would leave all to that brown boy, that changeling child.

  This is not how the Palmers and the Herzes spoke–not at all, not at all–but I am sorry to say that it is what they thought.

  They have little excuse for what you may take to be their greed and selfishness. You have already seen that they live in affluence. We have visited the Palmers’ house, and so pleasant is it there that we may be unable to resist going to see them at least once more. The Palmers live comfortably, eat well, and are surrounded by a cast of extras who effortlessly reinforce the Palmers’ sense of superiority. You might think they had no need to lay claim to Daniel’s mother’s riches. But you have not reckoned with two important considerations. The first of these is family jealousy, that long-ago, ancient, fairytale hatred which means that a brother does not like his sisters to gain at his expense–particularly when those sisters are not themselves in need. The second is the more immediate legacy of the last twenty years. Greed and selfishness have become respectable. Like family jealousy, they are not new, but they have gained a new sanction. It is now considered correct to covet. And Daniel is covetous. I am sorry to have to say this about a man who seems so generous, so agreeable, so drily distanced from all things ugly, a man so free with his tennis court and his wife’s cooking. But it is so. He is covetous, and he is mean. And he practises a profession, let us remember, in which base motives are more frequently encountered than fine motives.

  Nor should you take Patsy Palmer at face value. She seems a very nice woman, but has she bothered to remember to invite Sonia Barfoot to tea? (Do you remember Sonia Barfoot, that bleached manic-depressive visionary full of lithium?) No, she has not. Has she taken any steps to find any more permanent niche for Will Paine? No, she has not. She has got bored with him, and quietly evicted him. This was perhaps unwise of her. Has she noticed that her son Simon is spaced out and half mad? No, she has not. Patsy is a Mrs Jellyby, she likes problems that are not her own, and when they come too near home she rejects and denies them. That’s a bit harsh, but why not be harsh? And she too condemns the D’Angers. Daniel and Patsy Palmer collude in condemnation. Daniel thinks David is deliberately ripping them off; Patsy suspects Gogo is deliberately ripping them off. That’s how it goes.

  Patsy has had her eye on her share of Frieda’s money. She would not admit it but would not deny it. Her own mother is still alive, and is costing much in up-keep. She is in a flat, converted for the disabled. She has round-the-clock nursing. The family home was sold to pay for this, but Patsy’s mother costs nearly £500 a week. Patsy has three brothers. Patsy’s quarter diminishes week by week. Frieda’s money would come in handy. And there must be money: The Matriarchy of War is still in print, after forty years. It’s a set text. Other tides also survive. Patsy does not welcome the thought that the income of these Works might be diverted to Benjamin D’Anger. What about Simon, what about Emily? What if Daniel drops dead of a heart attack? These are the thoughts of Patsy Palmer.

  Let us move on to Rosemary and Nathan Herz. We have not yet seen them on their home ground, so let us join them in their ultramodern flat on the South Bank, overlooking the Thames. It is on the sixth floor of Ceylon Quay, off Rochester Square, near Southwark Bridge. It is late October, and Rosemary and Nathan are watching television in their vast split-level lounge. Jessica and Jonathan are asleep in their modern bedrooms. It has already been noted that Frieda’s children are not homemakers. They were not brought up in a tradition of homemaking. Daniel owes his considerable comforts to capable superwoman Patsy, and to a counterfeit, college-acquired, Middle-Temple-reinforced and slightly ironic vision of himself as country squire, a vision as compulsive as it is archaic. Gogo and David live in a colourful but not uncongenial turmoil, a turmoil reflected in many a middle-class professional British household up and down the land: their chosen careers do not demand (and indeed, in David’s case, almost counter-suggest) any excessive investment in bourgeois decor, and Gogo leaves her clinical instincts in the clinic. So they live in a mess. It is different for Rosemary and Nathan. They inhabit a designer world.

  Their flat, purchased at an inflated price in the late eighties, is a fine example of negative equity, pretension, technology and gadgetry. Its walls display inestimable art works, its drapes swish at the touch of a button, its sanitary ware is of the first water. The settee upon which they now recline cost a mere £4,000, and can adjust to many angles: the glass-topped table on which Rosemary rests her shining lustre-smooth crossed calves is customer built. The very coffee-cups are bespoke, from a visiting Japanese ceramic artist for whom Rosemary had once found a space. The wall lights are almost the very latest in uplighting, oblique lighting, dimmer lighting and slow fades. The television-set itself bears witness to the approaching millennium, for it is unobtrusively tuned in to every channel in and under the sky. Six tall sunflowers stand on the floor in a white pot, and from diagonally opposite corners of the room blink two small red angry ever-watchful eyes. If the beige curtains were open (which they are not) you would be able to see a magnificent view of the floodlit, neon-lit Thames. You might think, from looking at this room, that either Rosemary or Nathan had a pronounced and confident liking for the modern, but you would be wrong. It is because neither of them has any certainty of taste at all that they live like this. This apartment makes all their decisions for t
hem.

  You might think that Rosemary, working, as you have been told, in Arts Administration, might find herself misplaced in her career, if it is true that she has no taste. Wrong again. That’s why she’s quite good at it. (But not so good at it that she doesn’t feel the snapping at her heels from time to time.)

  They look quite cosy together, Nathan puffing away at his cigarette, and nursing a substantial post-prandial brandy, while Rosemary (and this is a bit of a surprise) works at a shapeless piece of crochet. They are watching a programme on one of the innumerable competing current-affairs cross-examinations that besiege and enrage the nation nightly. They are watching it because there, damnit, is their blasted brother-in-law, the sinisterly photogenic filmstar of race relations, David D’Anger. Nathan, as we have seen, likes David, but he is as suspicious of him as his wife admits herself to be. Rosemary is suspicious because she thinks David is probably a self-seeking bastard. Nathan is suspicious for the opposite reason. He suspects that David D’Anger may, after all, be a good man. After all, somebody’s got to be. He may be as high-minded as he seems to be. How can one tell? He looks and sounds so plausible. Would even God know, if there were a God? Probably not. What will it take to catch David D’Anger out for being what he is?

  On screen, the talk is of income distribution and the concept of relative poverty. D’Anger is good on this topic, they have to admit, and the others make such blisteringly idiotic remarks (‘I prefer not to talk about inequality but about income difference’–that one must be a classic) that they make David sound like the soul of sweet reason. And David’s statistics are beautiful. Elegantly, he bowls his fast outswingers; he is the Imran Khan of politics, the well-dressed aristocrat of the sophisticated political game. David plays the Rowntree Report, the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, the latest findings from the Child Poverty Action Group, and an incident he’d observed on the tube on the Northern Line between Chalk Farm and Camden Town. (David, one has to admit, has a brilliant line in grassroots and pavement anecdotes, all of which perforce go unchallenged and unrivalled by his opponents, for none of them, as David manages to insinuate, has ever travelled by public transport. David works the tubes and buses himself partly in the way of research, but they’re not to know that.) On this occasion, one of David’s adversaries is Milo Barking, a notorious little drunken pundit-whippersnapper, whose hard right-wing line is that all compassion is fake, and not only fake, but debilitating, corrupting, deceitful and dishonest. ‘Let’s admit it,’ says this white-faced rat, ‘we’re all a lot better off than we were in 1979, and we know it, all this talk about poverty is just a new version of Golden Age nostalgia for the Bad Old Days because all you poverty lobbyists see yourselves out of a job in a few months’ time–’