The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  He replays his encounters with Frieda, and she appears before him in her protean forms. Girlish in Indian print, as she walked down the towpath past the houseboats near Nuffield in Oxford, on the day that he and Gogo had announced their plans to marry. (She had taken a piece of bread from her large bag to feed the ducks.) Stout in green silk at his wedding in the gardens of Gladwyn, champagne in hand, holding court to dons and divines and assembled D’Angers from three continents. Eating a plateful of spaghetti in their Highbury flat, and holding the infant Benjamin in her arms as she uttered prophecies over him. Appearing with David himself and an MEP and a Minister of Agriculture on a programme about British sugar production. Accompanying David and the Minister round the sugar factory at Scalethwaite, inspecting steel silos amidst the fetid smell of cooking beet. Celebrating her sixtieth birthday at a large party at the Conservatory at the Barbican amidst tropical plants and orchids–the nearest I could get to Guyana, she had joked.

  At Timon’s feast in Romley. In her tea-gown at Ashcombe.

  And now, most vividly, most ominously returns to him the memory of another meeting. She appears to him as she had appeared on that ill-fated night three years ago–three years, four years, five years ago?–in Toronto. He had not even known she was in Canada, let alone in the same building, and had been startled to see his mother-in-law emerge from the make-up room of the space-age television studio where he was waiting to take part in a live TV phone-in on communitarianism and multiculturalism in Quebec and the UK. There she was, Frieda Haxby herself, curiously highly coloured, her grey hair puffed by eager fingers into a great crest. She had greeted him with a screech of delight, and informed him that she herself was to speak about the sensational discovery of the Swansberg Stone, an archaeological find which, if its runes proved authentic, would push back the date of Viking settlement in North America by some hundred years. She was as proud of this stone as if she had discovered it herself, as if she had been one of the first Viking seafarers to cross the Atlantic. And she was proud too of her glamorous son-in-law. How pleased they had been to see one another, amongst the alien crowd!

  Though David, as he explained to Frieda in the back of a Beck cab on their way to the Harborfront Hotel where both were staying, did not find Toronto alien. It allowed for him, as it allowed for the many. David D’Anger admired Toronto and Trudeau. Toronto had received over the decades Vikings and Vietnamese, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Italians and Indians, and had made them all welcome. Toronto was a young city, it had no old age, no middle ages. It had made its own contracts. How fortunate, to start so late in history, without the baggage of Britain. So they had mused, as they sat drinking in a slowly revolving bar high above the bright lights, the lake, the islands. They had talked of post-colonialism, of Guyana, of vanished empires, of rising empires, of the Pax Americana. They had talked, alas, too much, of too many things–of communism and perpetual revolution, of socialism in one country, of Stalin and Trotsky, of Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, of Coleridge and Pantisocracy, of the slow death of the vision of the just. Oh, it lingers on, David had said, this vision, artificially protected by university grants in departments of political theory, but nobody believes in it any more. Capitalism and the free market had triumphed. Only a poet or a fool or a philosopher would speak of justice now.

  The bar revolved very, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, as they drank their way through the night. And Frieda had probed him about new theories of social contract, about the possibility or impossibility of conceiving of a society as a closed system isolated from all other societies. Could one set up a just state in isolation? And could it survive? How quickly would it deteriorate? Would human nature itself change if society were changed from the roots? Could one eradicate the motive of greed? And is envy, as some philosophers have argued, an unnatural by-product of inequality? Or is it innate? And if innate, is it useful?

  Frieda had been taken by the idea of an experimental society, as others had been before her. You’d need time, she had concluded, in order to see it work through the generations. Time, and an isolated location. Guyana, she pointed out, would do well. Surely Professor Challenger could have discovered the Just Society up the Oronoque, instead of the dinosaurs? Wouldn’t David himself like to have a crack at it? This she had asked him, on top of the Harborfront Hotel, after a third of a bottle of Scotch, and he had said yes. Who would have thought that this conversation, and that fatal phrase, would have lodged in Frieda’s maverick imagination? Whyever had he told her about the Sixth Form Society he had founded at school, of his attempts to re-establish it at Oxford! It had only been a talking club, a discussion group, a game. They hadn’t meant to do anything. Had they? How could she have even thought of leaving money to the Just Society? As soon finance yet another expedition to raise the Titanic, or to dive for pirate gold amongst the hammer-headed sharks of Cocos Island!

  David D’Anger knows that the Just Society is an impossibility, that his brain cannot even conceive of it, as it cannot conceive of heaven or of hell. But he does not like to know that he knows it. He does not like to know that mankind and womankind are envious, greedy, violent and insincere.

  They had gone late to their beds, that night in Toronto, high, drunk, over-stimulated, jet-lagged. Had their difference in age been less embarrassing they would have slept together. At least David had been spared that memory. He knows that Frieda would have been willing. But the rest of the night had been bad enough. He had felt the whole room revolve as he lay in bed watching the revolving stories and advertisements and self-advertisements of CNN. Was a Just Society, he remembers thinking then, and thinks now, any more improbable than a society which runs on a diet of ‘stories’ about plagues in India and wars in Africa and serial killers in Idaho? To the repeated accompaniment of a ditty sung by an animated cartoon cash register which tells us that ‘Jingle bells mean Christmas sells’?

  Well, yes, the answer was that it was. The cash register sings the true tune.

  David lies awake in bed, as Gogo lies asleep beside him. (Benjamin too is awake, although David hopes he sleeps.) David mourns the lost trust of Daniel and Patsy Palmer, of Rosemary and Nathan Herz. David mourns the death of hope. He has been forced to indict himself, and now all his family know of his failure and his folly.

  He had meant no harm by speaking to Frieda of Eagle Valley, where the vast endangered harpy-eagles breed. Whatever had possessed him, to turn the loose cannon of Frieda Haxby’s powerful will towards the Just, towards the D’Angers, towards Eagle Valley? Had he been boasting of his heritage, as she had boasted her mystic links with the Swansberg Stone, with Queen Christina of Sweden? What tosh, what junk! Yes, he must have spoken of Eagle Valley, or she would not have been able to mention it in her Ur-will. Does it really exist, out of family mythology? David has never been there, nor has any other living D’Anger. The D’Angers are scattered round the globe–in Africa, Canada, Australia, India. They have peopled the world, but none of them has ever dared to visit the interior.

  So twice Jive miles of fertile ground

  With walls and towers were girdled round:

  And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills...

  The D’Angers do not know their ancestral land. Politics drove them out, and now they live in perpetual diaspora.

  Weave a circle round him thrice,

  And close your eyes with holy dread,

  For he on honey-dew hath fed

  And drunk the milk of paradise...

  David tries to lie still, as he summons up those forests, those waterfalls, those circling birds. The land of many waters. Pterodactyls, dinosaurs and monster fish with shining scales of pink and blue and silver. The red god and the maiden with the knife. The crab, the cave, the sacrifice. In the Guyanese savannah, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and seventy-eight, some nine hundred believers had died, had died willingly, at one man’s command. Could not at one man’s command nine hundred live?

  The forests and waterfalls fade and dissolv
e, and David sees instead a dream-image he knows and fears and tries to keep at bay: it is of one small puny deluded stick man, far away and far below, pulling and pulling at a vast heavy carpet of cloth. He is trying to drag it towards a peg, a hook, another seam of cloth? The cloth is as large and as heavy as the globe, and on it stand all the peoples of the globe, weighting it down. The tiny figure hawls and hawls, and strains and sweats, but the cloth does not shift or give. The figure is himself, and before him are all the rich leaden vested interests, all the dead weight of traditions, all the conglomerates and agglomerates and multinationals and conurbations, and behind them the multitudes of the thin starving sufferings. There is no hope of moving this mass. He has neither the brain nor the strength. He might as well let go. It will make no difference if he lets go. But if, by some superhuman miracle, he were to drag it even a centimetre, he knows he would have done well. So he cannot let go. Maybe all that the utmost of his effort can achieve is this terrible tension, without which the whole cloth will retract and unravel and unwind, and, like a released rope, uncoil at a speed which will destroy all in its violence? He must hang on, he must hang on. But he cannot hang on.

  Benjamin, along the corridor, lies awake. He is afraid to sleep, for his dreams are terrible. He dreams he is drowning in the lake in the Cave of Gloom. He fights for breath, he surfaces, but there is no surface. The roof of the cave is under the water. There is no space, no air. He drowns, and the fish nibble at his toes and fingers–little tickling nibbling fishmouths. His flesh frays, turns white, dissolves, shreds off. He is phosphorescent decay in the water. He has murdered his grandmother, and for this crime he must die.

  He fights to lie awake. He wishes to die. He wishes it were over, that he need struggle for breath no more. Let me let go, he prays. Dear God, let me go, let me depart to the Island of the Dead. He knows such prayers are sinful.

  What is the sin he has committed? It is in the Game. He should not have meddled with those powers. He should not have assumed those powers. Now he has lost them for ever. He can no longer animate the inanimate, for he can no longer animate himself. He has invoked bad spirit, black spirit. He promises God, he promises Jesus Christ of the Christians, that if he lives through this night he will renounce all his kingdom. He will recall his subjects and lay them all to rest.

  His mind burns, his skin burns, the night prolongs into torture. Will it never end? Shall he creep for comfort into his mother’s bed? But he cannot, for he is a wicked boy. He must remove himself, before he kills them too, as he killed his grandmother Frieda. He cannot creep back into his mother, for he is a child no longer. Something frightful has happened to his body. It is not man, it is not child, it is monster. Will the long night never end? He counts up to a thousand, up to two thousand, up to ninety-nine thousand. A long dead march of numbers. But why should he wish for the morning? The morning will bring no relief, the daytime no respite.

  Gogo is in a fever of anxiety. Something must be done, but what? Benjamin is fading before her eyes. He too now has a fever: his temperature rises to a hundred and four, to a hundred and five, and sweat drops off his thin body through the sheets and the mattress to the floor. Glandular fever, scarlet fever, viral meningitis? She summons her GP, and blood samples are sent off for urgent testing. She sits rigid, like a plaster statue, by his bed, with a yellow pudding bowl of cold water and a white cloth upon her knee. Mater dolorosa, thinks David with a pang, as he sees her vigil. Then wishes the thought undone. The wooden cathedral of his childhood had been brightly coloured, and so too remains Gogo, even in grief, though her colours are less tawdry than those of the madonna–a dark red skirt, cinnamon shirt, a dark draped plum scarf wound around her head. Benjamin lies rigid, staring at the ceiling, occasionally covering his eyes with a bony crook of elbow. Gogo keeps the lights dim. Benjamin’s lips are dry.

  Gogo cannot keep vigil day and night, for she has to go to the hospital in Bloomsbury, the clinic in Maida Vale. She rearranges her patients as best she may, but she must keep most of her appointments. She knows she is no longer functioning well. She does not listen closely as symptoms are described, her mind wanders homewards as she examines the X-rays and scans of the nervous systems of strangers. Will Benjamin’s illness show up on a screen?

  A hired hand sits by Benjamin when Gogo is not there. David too cancels much of his life, and hovers, helplessly. Shall they insist on Benjie’s being taken into hospital? You would think that with their joint expertise they would be able to ride the system, to insist on a private wing, on a short cut to instant health, but they are curiously inept in the face of crisis. They do not want to let their only one out of their sight, out of their home. The fever lasts for only a couple of days, although it seems like weeks, and it vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, leaving Benjamin as he had been before he overheated-listless, apathetic, withdrawn. All tests have proved negative. There is nothing wrong with Benjamin. There is everything wrong with Benjamin.

  This is not Gogo’s field. The nervous system is her field–the cervical nerve, the somatic nerves, the cranial nerves, the gyri, the sulci, the cerebellum, the spinal nerves and the sympathetic chain. Benjamin is sick not in the nerves but in the spirit. Neither Gogo nor David know how to reach his spirit. They tempt him with delicacies, they bring him books, they install a television by his bed. He does not eat, he does not read, he does not watch, except while his parents are watching, from a residual politeness. When questioned, he says he feels cold. Sometimes he mutters to himself, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it,’ but when they ask what it is he cannot do he turns his face to the wall and will not say.

  Gogo rings up a friend at the Tavistock to ask about childhood depression. David rings his mother in Birmingham and asks her to come up to London. Perhaps one grandmother can right the wrongs of the other.

  Ronjon de Lanerolle, Benjie’s best friend at school, is prompted by his elders to come and see Benjie. The visit is not a success. Ronjon is puzzled and irritated by his friend’s lack of response to any of his conversational gambits, and ends up glumly watching an Australian soap opera on Benjie’s bedside TV. He cannot wait to get away. Nevertheless, he promises to come again soon.

  It is Benjie himself who asks after his cousin Emily. It is the first sign of curiosity he has shown for a week. Gogo rings Patsy, and Patsy says that Emily is, as it happens, on her way back to England for a friend’s eighteenth-birthday celebration: shall she ask her to ring Benjie? Gogo unburdens herself a little to Patsy, though she is too proud to show the depths of her anxiety. Patsy is sympathetic. She confesses that she has her own worries about Simon. His tutor says he seems to have dropped out of everything and he has run up enormous bills at the college buttery and on his bank card. Daniel has had to put a stop to his son’s credit. What can Simon be up to? Surely, Patsy asks Gogo, he can’t be on drugs, can he? He wouldn’t be so stupid, would he? Gogo’s silence replies.

  Emily comes to see Benjie on the morning after the schoolfriend’s birthday party in Crouch End. As we have seen, she is fond of Benjie, and is proud to be requested. She had been happy to play big sister to this charming boy, had treasured his confidences. The role of Nurse Emily appeals to her, but when she sees Benjamin, hunched in his bed, she is alarmed. This case is beyond her. He holds her hand as she sits by the bed. His hand is dry and hot and thin. He looks like a little fledgling bird, a poor wounded bird, a bird blown off course. A little finch.

  ‘What’s up, Benjie Boy?’ she asks as cheerfully as she can. At first he shakes his head and will not speak. After a while he mutters, ‘Grandma Frieda. What happened to her? They won’t tell me.’

  ‘They don’t know, Benjie,’ says Emily. ‘She’s dead, but they don’t know how it happened. That’s why they haven’t told you. They’re not keeping anything from you. Not that I know of.’

  ‘She drowned,’ says Benjie.

  ‘They think she fell,’ says Emily.

  ‘Do you know what she told me?’ says Benjie. ‘She told me
:

  Crows are green, and rooks are blue,

  Crows are three and rooks are two,

  I may live for ever, and so may you.

  What do you think it means?’

  He has to say it again, before Emily can take it in. She ponders, it’s some kind of spell,’ she says. ‘But it’s a good spell, can’t you see? It says she’ll live for ever, that she’s not dead at all. I kind of believe that, don’t you?’

  Benjie shakes his head but he looks very slightly cheered, before he plunges back into melancholy.

  He makes Emily promise that she will go to the Old Farm and collect the Power Game for him and bring it to him in London. Emily had not been keen to go to Hampshire, but for Benjie’s sake she consents. He seems to think it is important. He doesn’t want to see Jess and Jon, though. He makes this clear. They mustn’t know. They will hate him now.

  Emily assumes this is something to do with the legacy, but doesn’t know how to respond to his fear. Shall she tell him that she herself doesn’t want a penny of Frieda’s gold? No, better not, better not even mention it. She pats Benjie warmly, as warmly as one can pat an unresponsive little bundle, and as she makes to leave the sickroom a thought strikes her. ‘I say, Benjie,’ she says, ‘you know, crows are green and rooks are blue. Well, sort of. They’re both black, but they have a different sheen. It’s one of the ways to tell them apart. It’s quite a useful little rhyme. Do you think she made it up? I’ve never heard it before.’

  ‘Emily,’ he says, as she stands on the threshold. ‘What are harpies? Are they birds?’