The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Gertrude Cohen had been a friend of Frieda Haxby’s, but that does not necessarily disqualify her from being the wisest woman in Europe. She responds to their appeal, and comes round to see them, although she says she is now old and retired. She is like a caricature of what such a woman might be imagined to be. One of the most eminent of the 1930s refugee generation, she has written several books on child development, on child psychology and on child psychotherapy. Her accent is guttural, her eyes fierce, her hair grey and wiry and wild. She stares at them through spectacles tethered to her bosom by a gold pin and a gold chain. She had opened her career with a study of separation, loss and survivor guilt, and in later years had specialized in adolescent depression and–though they do not mention this–adolescent death. She had worked with the terminally ill child, wiith the suicidal child. She has been into the caverns of the mind. She has seen grief and torment. There she sits, drinking China tea with lemon, a wise woman who has been into the underworld and led others up to the light of day. They gaze at this old woman, whom normally they would I fear have regarded in benign and superior amusement. They gaze at her in a mixture of awe and hope. They throw themselves upon her mercy.

  Gertrude Cohen listens patiently, a withered sybil. She has heard all the stories of all the world before. All parents think their child the brightest and the best of the sons of the morning. David D’Anger and Grace D’Anger are Everyman and Everywoman. They tell the strange tale of Frieda’s wills, and here Gertrude Cohen shows them the favour of looking more than usually alert–for this is a variation, she concedes. Frieda had been an original. Gertrude Cohen looks at Frieda’s daughter Grace with a glimmering of professional respect, as though acknowledging that Gogo had done well to stay alive and gain qualifications and get married and hold down a decent job. Gertrude Cohen accepts another Marie biscuit, which she nibbles with her evenly white false front teeth.

  Then Gertrude Cohen plunges them into gloom by declaring that she is far too old to practise. It would be wrong for her even to set eyes on Benjamin. But she is sure they were right to refer the case to her. (They brighten, like good students praised in class.) She would like to recommend that they take Benjamin to see a colleague of hers, now practising at the Jameson Clinic. This colleague would be a most suitable person, in her view, to interview Benjamin. Of course, she cannot speak for her colleague, as her colleague is much in demand and may not be able to take on any more cases at the moment, and they will appreciate that even in the event of an acceptance the treatment may be long. (It will also, she implies, be costly, though she does not spell this out.)

  David and Gogo nod, meekly, gratefully. They wait for the magic name of the designate, the successor. Gertrude Cohen inscribes it on a page of a notebook, which she tears out and hands to them. It reads

  Lily McNab

  18 Dresden Road

  Maida Vale

  London NW8

  Miss Cohen has also given them a phone number, and the address of the clinic, which is in St John’s Wood.

  David and Gogo stare at this scrap of paper with an unjustifiable degree of faith and expectation. The very name of Lily McNab reassures them. They thank Gertrude Cohen profusely, and ask if they can ring her a cab. Not at all, she says, quite tardy. She is quite capable of walking to the station. Can David drive her to the station, they ask. Certainly not, she says. Exercise is good for me, she says, and off she marches to Highbury and Islington, on the stick-like and slightly bandy legs that have walked her into Dachau and out of it, that have walked her into the night and out of the night and now will walk her unbowed into the vale.

  David does not believe in private medicine. Gogo does not believe in psychoanalysis. But they both believe in Lily McNab. They have no choice.

  Before we meet Lily McNab, let us return, briefly, to the Herz household by the river. We suspect all is not well with the Herzes. Jessica and Jon are fine, and we don’t have to worry about them: let’s say that they are lucky in their choice of genes on the Herz side, and although they have inherited the Palmer colouring they have also received a fair amount of natural optimism and gregariousness from their Golders Green gran. They have been only mildly affected by the expurgated news of Benjie’s illness, for they had sensed he was growing out of them anyway. It’s a pity, but that’s how it is. They have not been told about their mother’s condition, and they have not guessed that there is anything wrong with her, for they are accustomed to her short temper, her vagaries, her busyness, her exhaustions, her absences. They are enjoying the relaxed reign of a particularly amusing non-live-in paid minder called Chantal, who collects them from school, cooks their suppers, takes them to the movies. Chantal is a laugh. She lets them stay up all hours while she chats on the phone to her boyfriend in Beirut. We can forget about Jess and Jon. As Chantal herself, unmindful of their fate, so often does.

  Rosemary demands a little more of our attention, for her situation is more complicated and more developed. Although she feels no physical effects from her medical condition, her mental unease increases, for it is clear that her suspicions have been correct. There is something wrong with her kidneys. Is it serious? The specialist will not commit himself, he hedges his bets. He annoys Rosemary by returning once more to the subject of her ancestry. He seems to wish to insist that she has inherited degenerate kidneys. As Rosemary’s mother’s kidneys have by now been eaten by the mackerel and the dogfish of the Atlantic, there is no way of inspecting them for clues, and Rosemary is obliged to state quite bluntly that she cannot inform Mr Saunders of the cause of the death of her father, Andrew Palmer. Indeed she cannot confirm that he is dead. And she has no intention of digging around in the family gene cemetery for the kidneys of her grandparents. The Palmers, she bluffs, had been military men, and a lot of them had died of malaria and dysentery and alcohol in India. Smart diseases, positional complaints. The Haxbys had gone in, less smartly, for strokes. He can make of that what he will. It is up to him to sort this out. That is what he is paid for.

  Mr Saunders finds her a tricky and unsympathetic customer. He could almost prefer the days when patients were patients. He’d been paid nearly as much, in the good old pre-market days, and he’d been treated with a lot more respect. Respect is worth something. Respect is a positional good.

  Rosemary wonders whether to confide her fears to Nathan, as most wives would. But she is not most wives. And Nathan is in unreceptive mood. His position in the firm is embattled, and he is abstracted. He and his team seem quite unable to come up with anything brilliant or new on the Health Marketing Plan. It is all cliche, all pastiche. He wonders whether it would be possible to break out completely, to think the unthinkable, to start marketing not by reassurance and innuendo but by full frontal fear? A Black Campaign? Skeletons, diseased organs, skulls, scare stories? Or what about extending the lottery to spare parts, kidney machines, fertility treatment, hip replacement? He tries this out on Rosemary, who is usually receptive to his darker jokes, but she seems curiously unamused. In vain does he insist that we all know quite well that it’s done by lottery anyway, and has been, discreetly, for decades: she’s been strongly in favour of the lottery money for the arts, so why should she disapprove of Bangladeshi kidneys by lottery? She makes it clear that she does not wish to continue this conversation. He can’t see why she’s being so squeamish, and is not in a position to guess that she is wondering if she has been correctly advised that no private insurance on earth would cover the cost of long-term renal dialysis. She has not yet had the courage to inspect the small print of her own policy. And no, she does not agree with Nathan that we will, by the end of the century, solve the health service crisis by introducing legalized euthanasia. Demographically, it’s a cert, insists Nathan. It’s got to come, so why not go for it now? But Rosemary won’t listen, and neither will the punters or the electorate. Purgatorial flames are already big business, argues Nathan. The American way of death. Forest Lawns. Oh, shut up, says Rosemary pettishly, feeling her pulse flutter.
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br />   And Nathan himself can’t find much consolation in these fantasies. Can he be losing faith in the market?

  Nathan loves the lottery, he is a heavy investor in scratch cards and lottery tickets, he doesn’t think much of the dull puritanism of Daniel and Patsy Palmer, of David and Gogo D’Anger, who disapprove of the whole damn thing. But he doesn’t think his number is going to come up. So far he’s only made twenty-five quid back, and he’s spent hundreds. What he’d said to Daniel, about his pressing need for £20,000, had been less than the truth. He needs more than twenty, he needs a hundred grand. Nathan Herz is in trouble. He has forgotten to charge a client, for a bill of £120,000; a year has passed, and now he dare not send in the bill, he dare not own up to his colleagues. He’s not been a criminal: just bloody stupid. He has been lying awake at nights with worry, listening to the lap of the Thames. He is getting stale. He is making mistakes. He hears whispering behind closed doors. Rosemary thinks she is for the axe, and Nathan is beginning to think he is for the high jump: from being a two-income, high-earning, upwardly mobile family, they are about to become a no-income, on the skids, debt-ridden casualty. Can this be so?

  And Nathan is beginning to think he had never been a real achiever. (He is too subtle, too clever, he tries to console himself.) That summer he and Rosemary had been guests on a week’s cruise of the Turkish Aegean, invited by the richest of the rich. Fabulous money, unimaginable money. Nathan had been unnerved, unsettled, and so had Rosemary, though she had tried not to show it. They had been invited by Greta and Bob Eagleburger, patrons of the arts, friends of Rosemary’s. Greta painted on Sundays, Bob bought. Theirs was the yacht, theirs were the Braques and the Dufys and the Hockneys that hung on the walls of this floating emblem of good taste. For the Eagleburgers had an eye, they had bought well. Bob Eagleburger had an eye for Rosemary, but Nathan could tolerate that: it was the grand luxe that pissed him off. Luxe, calme et volupté. Servants, champagnes, diamonds. And a fucking Turner, a real Turner, in the Circe Lounge. Generous, were the Eagleburgers, to their little crew of sponging impressionable guests: generous, and mean with it, for they sometimes made them sing for their suppers. The rich are like that. They can make demands. The Herzes and the Spensers had sung to their tune. Even Harry Danzig, lord of unnumbered acres of barren Scottish moorland, had jumped at their bidding. Lord Danzig’s demeanour was impenetrably civil and servile, as he accepted Eagleburger largesse, as he toiled round ruins and tinkled old dance tunes on the piano and entertained with indiscreet tales of royalty. The Spensers had been less docile: once Nathan had caught a subversive smirk of astonished disbelief on Sandy Spenser’s face at the appearance of yet another farfetched miracle of cuisine. But Sandy was a sculptor: he could afford to smirk. The Herzes could not. They had to toe the line.

  Nathan Herz knew he would never be in the big league, but he had not realized, until he set sail with the Eagleburgers, that he was a pauper. The rich are different from us. And in the last decade, they have become more and more different. The rich have got richer and richer. Nathan knew he could not afford to keep that yacht afloat for half an hour, for five minutes. Yet until that invitation, until that cruise, he had thought himself to be doing well. His confidence had gone.

  Nathan wanders round the perfume department of Selfridges on the Thursday evening that Benjie D’Anger is rescued from the bath. He is looking for a birthday present for his mother, but he is dreaming of the Turner in the Circe Lounge. It had been of a beauty to break the heart. An unfinished oil, of a rocky Mediterranean shore, with caves and a natural arch topped with a brush of trees: in the foreground, on the beach, strayed dimly painted figures, emerging from stone and sand and sea as though from the ancient forms of time itself. And across the blue and emerald water the faint sketched shapes of • antique ghostly ships. Gold, amber, aquamarine.

  His mother would not want a Turner, so that’s all right. She is the easiest woman in the world to please, and Nathan has always enjoyed buying her gifts, for she is delighted by any small female treat–by soaps, salts, sprays, oils, lotions, perfumes. And Nathan loves the cosmetic halls of the large department stores. Selfridges has a grandeur, a dignity that the new out-of-town malls will never achieve. Its Corinthian pillars, its carved cherubs, its brass plaques, its bronzed marble, its Egyptian sphinx-lions, its pigeon-netting, its lofty lifts, its history. A woman here may be queen for a day, a man may be a prince, a benefactor. He enjoys chatting up the sales girls, as they lean forward with their glowing pellicles and sexy clinical uniforms, fluttering their long false lashes at him, dabbing or squirting fluids on to the back of his hairy wrist. He sniffs the scents of Arabia, the distillations of rose and cat and whale. He has the keenest sense of smell. He is a sensuous man. The perfumes glow gold and blue and amber and crystal in caskets and chalices, in ziggurats and phalluses, in pearls and cubes and apples of clear and cut and bevelled and frosted glass. Their names are the names of Temptation, Obsession, Possession, Frivolity. This is the apotheosis of presentation, the triumph of form over content. Minimal dabs of exorbitantly expensive cream and jelly reside in elfcups magnified by prisms, enclosed in deceitful phials, emprisoned in false-bottomed boxes. Who wants No Nonsense packaging? The package is the product.

  Salesperson Tricia Chang insists that the Principessa Venier is the best of this season’s new perfumes. She daubs, Nathan inhales. He cannot really get a proper whiff of the Principessa, he complains, for he is already too bespattered by the newest names from Chanel and Guerlain, from Cabochard and Klein, from Lancome and Armani: would Tricia happen to have a spare clear inch or two of her own personal skin to test it upon? He likes the deep sea-green glass of the container, the long old-fashioned scent-bottle slim column of it, the under-watery pearl of the stopper. Could she oblige? Honey-skinned Tricia smiles, with her curved mahogany-red lips, and stares at him with widened, skilfully outlined, china-and-white-and-cornflower eyes: then she modestly lowers her lashes, opts for her left wrist, sprays it, extends it across the glittering counter to the gallant frog-like Nathan. Nathan takes her hand, smells it, breathes her in.

  The Principessa Venier and Tricia Chang do not smell good to Nathan. They smell of dankness and drains. He inhales again. Has some sinister chemical reaction taken place? The Principessa smells of death in Venice. Nathan looks up sharply, at Tricia’s waxy cherished blandly smiling face: she is not mocking him, she has not turned into a deathmask, she has not begun to decay before his eyes. But this, this is Belle’s little dead hand he is holding in his. He squeezes it, and breathes again, sorrowfully, the putrid odour of river water. Tricia is now pulling her hand back again, aware that the quality of his grip has changed from flirtation to desperation. This attractive, ugly middle-aged man is in crisis, she can tell, and he relinquishes her member with a sigh of profound sadness, and shakes his head. No, he cannot say he likes the Principessa Venier. Nor would his mother like it. It is too dark for her. He wants something lighter–something more ?–he searches for a word. More floral? suggests Tricia, sympathetically. She is used to dealing with incompetent, wordless men. Yes, more floral, agrees Nathan meekly. The spirit has gone out of him, the fun of choice has abandoned him. He lets Tricia choose for him. She selects a short list of three, but cannot recapture his interest. He allows her to sell him a small flagon of Vie en Rose, which reminds him of those overpowering synthetic pink roses in Daniel’s garden at the Old Farm; Tricia assures him that it is very popular with the more traditional older lady. Tricia Chang wraps it in shiny gift wrapping, and seals it, and ribbons it, and teases its ribbon into butterfly bows and corkscrew spirals, and encloses it in a gift baglet. She does her very best with the packaging. She feels she has failed this mystery man, this man of moods. When he has gone, she covertly sniffs at her rejected hand. She cannot see that it smells bad. She likes the Principessa. But perfume is a tricky, a personal affair. It is, as she has been told on a course she once attended, as much of an art as science.

  Nathan boards a cab and o
n his way home he broods once more on money. He is rich enough to buy his mother a birthday present fit for a duchess, but he is not rich enough to be able to buy his way out of trouble. The lights of Oxford Street glitter garishly. Jingle bells, Christmas sells. The taxi, avoiding roadworks, makes for Blackfriars Bridge. On impulse (is that the name of a perfume?) Nathan asks the cab to stop on the far side, on the Surrey bank. He descends, and then he descends. He makes his way down steps to the water’s edge. He thinks of Belle.

  He walks under the bridge, past a panorama of painted tiles taken from prints of old designs of Blackfriars. He is not thinking of old London. He is thinking of Roberto Calvi, God’s banker, who had hanged himself by a yard of nylon rope from a pile of scaffolding beneath the north side of this bridge in 1982. Or was he murdered by the Pope’s henchmen, by members of a Masonic Lodge? Calvi was carrying a crudely forged passport, and his pockets had been stuffed with foreign banknotes and ten pounds of stones lifted from the grounds of the City of London School which Jonathan Herz will soon attend. A good old-fashioned revenge tragedy, here by the water’s edge, so near the stones of the Rose, so near the thatch of the Globe. Mutatis mutandis. There had been two inquests.

  The arches of the bridge curve and soar, the traffic above thunders and rumbles. Road-works are in progress, somewhere up there–when are they not?–and strange lumps of cladding and loose heavy dirty swathes of industrial-weight polythene protrude and dangle and flap in the night air. Grey and black, black and grey, a fine nocturne. They have cleaned this stretch of riverside walk, have tamed and urbanized it, but nevertheless Nathan notes piles of greywhite birdshit and feathery filth, and a heap of red rags abandoned by a nesting beggar. A browning banana skin lies on top of the red rags. The little heap is eloquent–a still life, a dead life. The brave red cries out.