The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Nathan strides out eastwards along the reclaimed Jubilee pathway, watching the lights dimple and glimmer on the tide. A police boat cruises purposefully downstream, and a little commercial launch advertising advertising buzzes towards him from Southwark. The Bow-belle, The Marchioness. Belle drowned, Frieda Haxby drowned, Robert Maxwell drowned, and Calvi hanged himself where he could dangle in the water.

  Nathan Herz, with his glossy oblong gold-corded gift bag and his sober briefcase, stares up at the high brick fortress wall of the power station and at the moon lying drunkenly on her back in the November sky. Swags of cloud are lit silver-blue by the moon’s aura. Lottery money will transform this power station into an art gallery, but as yet there are few signs of development. Barbed-wire, weeds, demolition, desolation, solitude.

  A flight of steps draws him down to the water’s edge. He stands on the margin. The tide is rising. His executive shoes gleam black against the oily black. He listens to the sucking and the sighing. The wash of a midstream wake ripples towards him, but he does not step back from it. It laps upwards, splashes his shoes: it subsides and withdraws. He takes one step down towards it, tempting the next wave, but it does not rise again.

  The water sighs, and Nathan sighs, and a seagull cries. Roberto Calvi had been strung up for one and a half thousand million dollars, and brought down the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Robert Maxwell had gone under dragging the pensions of thousands in a string of silver bubbles after him. Young Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank for seven point seven seven seven billions of yen. Nathan Herz is not in their league. He is a small trader. A man of the past, not a man of the future. Or so he thinks, on this sad night.

  Now we may return to Lily McNab. You remember the name of Lily McNab, child psychotherapist? We have not yet been introduced. We have several possibilities with Ms McNab. Is she a scholarly grey-haired owl-spectacled Scot with an Edinburgh accent? An imported American from New York? A Belsize Park matron who walks regularly upon the Heath with a small dog? A lipsticked lesbian from Leeds? She could be any of these characters. We had better take care, in our choice of attributes for Ms McNab, for it is a fact that there are fewer than 350 child psychotherapists in the whole of the United Kingdom, and we do not wish to be sued for libel if Lily McNab should fail. (It is a curious fact that the United Kingdom, which indulges in delightful hot-flushed orgies of recrimination and sentimentality whenever a child is conspicuously abused, injured or foully murdered, has refused to finance the long, rigorous and expensive trainings of these 350–but that is by the way.)

  All that we know of Lily McNab, until we are ushered into her presence, is that by some means she has raised the money for this training, and that she must be younger than Gertrude Cohen, who recommended her. But as Gertrude Cohen is in her eighties, that leaves space for speculation. Lily McNab may be in her sixties. Whoever she is, she has what might be considered a daunting assignment in taking on the D’Angers and their son. But she has been trained, we may assume, not to be daunted.

  We stand on her doorstep in Dresden Road, and locate her doorbell. Already she begins to materialize, for her terraced house is neat, white-painted and well-maintained, and it has windowboxes with flowering plants in them on the upper floors. It appears that she also has lodgers or partners, for there are other names on other bells. This is an expensive district, and smarter than the area where the D’Angers live. Lily McNab cannot be poor. Will she have a receptionist? Will she open the door herself?

  Gogo and David stand and wait. They have come together to confront their saviour. United they stand.

  Yes, this is Lily McNab who ushers them in. She is tall, bespectacled, large-featured, in her forties, wearing a rust-coloured trouser suit and a cream silk roll-necked sweater. She also wears lipstick. And she is black.

  Well, perhaps not black black. More a lightish brown.

  David D’Anger hopes that he has not done unto her what has so often been done unto him. But he cannot be sure that he has not.

  It will emerge, in the next weeks, that the parents of Lily McNab were Indian Jews from Calcutta. She herself was born in Calcutta but has been educated in Scotland. Her birthname was Gubbay. She is married to a barrister called Jeremy McNab. She has an indefinably hybrid accent when she speaks, and her voice is low and husky.

  Is this heritage of any relevance to her profession, to our story, to the fate of Benjamin D’Anger? Has Gertrude Cohen, as David instantly suspects, deliberately matched Benjamin with Mrs McNab? And if so, why? And was it wisely done?

  Only time will tell. As Lily McNab explains, as the D’Angers already know, there is no miracle cure. If Benjamin is willing to come to see her–and there will be resistance, it is normal for there to be resistance–then she will see him.

  The D’Angers drive back to Highbury with hope in their hearts. They have taken action. Surely love and money can save Benjamin.

  ***

  Will Paine has found himself a job. He has flown east from Jamaica to Trinidad, to cover his tracks, and has been taken on as a cleaner by an American-owned hotel. He has struck lucky. Nobody seems to want to fuss too much about his papers. He has changed his name, and now calls himself Robert. He answers to his new name smartly, and works hard. He sleeps in a room the size of a broom cupboard, and hides Frieda’s money in a sock in his travelling bag. He daren’t try to bank it. He’s afraid of banks, as his mother was before him. He’s changed some of Frieda’s money into dollars, and he’s spent some of it on airticlcets, but quite a lot of it is still in the very same pounds sterling that had leaped from the cash stations of Exmoor. What if the notes are marked?

  Will Paine has found friends to hang out with, to smoke a joint with. One of them is a bellboy and wears a red uniform with gold braid and his name on a metal badge. His name is Marvin. Will also knows Marvin’s girl, Glory, who works as a masseuse and studied alternative medicine at nightschool. These are nice friends for Will Paine. Marvin is political and talks about Black Power and whatever happened to it and why the Caribbean isn’t doing as well as it should. Glory is more into New Age mysticism and thinks that all will be well. Will Paine is interested in what both of them have to say. Sometimes he too speaks. He does not tell them about Frieda Haxby, for she is his secret, but he tries to describe David D’Anger from Guyana and Highbury, David D’Anger, parliamentary candidate for a sprawling constituency in West Yorkshire where Will had once worked in a pasta factory. He attempts, not unsuccessfully, to convey the concept of the Veil of Ignorance. They discuss their own initial positions and whether they would have altered them if they could. They agree that the institutions of society favour certain starting places over others, and that these advantages provoke especially deep inequalities. They affect one’s initial chances in life, and all subsequent chances. Marvin and Glory believe they have been disadvantaged, and are puzzled by Will Paine’s view that he himself has had a good deal of good luck. They are even more puzzled by Will’s assertion that, according to David D’Anger, none would urge that special privileges should be given to those exactly six feet tall or born on a sunny day, or special disadvantages imposed according to the colour of one’s skin or the texture of one’s hair. As far as they can see, such preferences are being urged, not to say practised, all around them every day.

  David D’Anger, they agree, must live in a rum world. He has clearly had far more advantages than any of them and they have turned his brain. He has had too much luck and it will do him no good in the long run. They all agree that some of the guests at the hotel where Marvin and Will work do not seem to have earned their leisure and their wealth by any recognizable concept of merit or desert. Jus :ice as fairness hardly shines out in the Mayfair Hotel. Some of the women–well, it’s hard to imagine what they can have done to get themselves where they are. Can they have been very very good in their past lives? Surely that’s not what the Buddhists mean–that if you’re very very saintly and live on brown rice with a begging bowl dressed in c range you’ll be re
incarnated as a waddling fat-arse with a loud mouth and fuchsia earrings?

  Glory says they are thinking on the wrong plane and that she doesn’t envy these poor ladies at all. She wouldn’t at all like to be fat like that. They can’t help it, says Glory. They don’t like being fit any more than you would like it, she tells Will and Marvin.

  Marvin diplomatically changes the subject and says he likes the Japanese. The Japanese, unlike some, are always very civil to him. People make fun of them, says Marvin, but they are a very polite people. And they tip well.

  Benjamin will be a long time mending, and Frieda’s testaments will be long in the proving. It had not occurred to Frieda or her lawyers that her grandson might not long outlive her, might choose to thrown himself in his bath during the period of probate. Better lawyers than Goltho & Goltho might have been forgiven for overlooking such a possibility. Had Benjamin died on that November night, what would have happened to Frieda’s money? It does not bear thinking about. He will live to inherit. Lily McNab will guide him back to life. There is hope for Benjamin. He has deep problems, deep delusions, but he can be brought to the surface. Benjamin D’Anger manages a sort of ghostly smile for Saul Sinnamary, who arrives from Singapore, true to his word, bearing a bright book of the Birds of South America, of coloured plates of great expense and beauty. Saul sits by Benjie and turns the pages. They come to the picture of the whip-poor-will, the goatsucker, a night bird related to the European nightjar with (Saul reads), ‘large eyes and cryptic plumage’. That’s us, man, says Saul to Benjie. Large eyes and cryptic plumage. And listen–Saul reads from the accompanying text, a quotation from an eighteenth-century traveller from Yorkshire, who had defended the poor humble bird from its dark, its criminal reputation. Saul reads, Benjie listens. Saul reads very well: he has had a lot of practice.

  ‘The prettily mottled plumage of the goatsucker, like that of the owl, wants the lustre which is observed in the feathers of the birds of the day. This makes him a lover of the pale moon’s nightly beams ... His cry is so remarkable, that having once heard it, you will never forget it. When night reigns over the immeasurable wilds, you will hear this poor bird lamenting like one in deep distress. A stranger would say it was the departing voice of a midnight murdered victim, or the last wailing of Niobe for her children ... Suppose yourself in hopeless sorrow, begin with a loud high note, and pronounce “ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha”, each note lower and lower, till the last is scarcely heard, pausing for a moment or two betwixt every note, and you will have some idea of the moaning of the largest goatsucker in Demerara. Four other species articulate their words distinctly, crying “Who are you, who who who are you” or “Work away, work work work away” or “Willy come-go, Willy Willy Willy come-up” or “Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will”.’ Saul reproduces these cries with haunting, heart-breaking melancholy, and concludes, in Charles Waterton’s words, ‘You will never persuade the negro to destroy these birds, or get the Indians to let his arrows fly at them. They are birds of omen and reverential dread. They are the receptacles for departed souls. They haunt the cruel and the hard-hearted master. Listen again! Listen! “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...” ’

  Saul’s fine rendering of the cry of the nightjar-goatsucker is so moving that he begins to cry, for he is an emotional chap, easily distressed; Benjamin too begins to sob, and they sit and hug and weep. Saul wonders if he has gone too far, but he believes in tears, he believes in emotion, he thinks the Guyanese half of Benjie has been repressed, it will do him good to weep and wail. As he sits there, hugging Benjie D’Anger, he decides he could write some bird-poems, try some bird-poem-readings. If they affect a larger audience as they have affected this boy, he will be on to a good thing.

  When Benjie has sniffed and blown his nose, he looks a lot more cheerful, and more alert. He wants to know who wrote the bit about the bird, and Saul looks up the name and dates of Yorkshire squire Charles Waterton, and promises to investigate further. He wants to know if Saul really knows about birds, and Saul is cornered into modesty. For all the hundreds of species he had ticked off on his checklist, he admits he can only recognize, unaided, a dozen or so. ‘Poets are cheats, Benjie,’ he says. ‘You remember that. They get drunk on words. They like words and sounds. Some of them use their eyes, but a lot of them only use their ears. Have you heard of Sylvia Plath?’

  Benjie nods. (Odd, thinks Saul, how all conversation with Benjie seems to plunge of its own accord towards suicide and death, but he ploughs on.)

  ‘Sylvia Plath,’ says Saul Sinnamary, ‘was a great poet. But she couldn’t tell a rook from a jackdaw.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asks Benjie.

  ‘Because she said so.’

  Saul has struck a lucky subject. He confesses that he himself, like Plath, is bad at British birds, all of which look much the same to him, and Benjie is able to recite Frieda’s little rhyme. Saul is delighted with it. He repeats it, writes it down. He can do something with it, he thinks.

  The solitary egret walks through the salt marsh.

  Benjamin studies the plates of the book which Saul Sinnamary has entrusted to him, and discovers from a footnote that Charles Waterton had most improbably been married to the granddaughter of an Arawak princess from Guyana. David D’Anger, also true to his word, remembers to track down the reference by Andrew Salkey to Wilson Harris’s lecture in Georgetown in 1970, and he finds it: Salkey, studying the audience at this event, noted of Guyana’s once and future Premier and long-time Leader of the Opposition: ‘Dr Cheddi Jagan interested me most. For a man who has had to deal, variously, with the wily, rhetoric-laden representatives of British Imperialism and with the cryptic vocabulary of the infiltrating priests of the State Department and the CIA, and also with the Minotaur of Guyanese Party politics with their gelignite of opposing races, a man, in other words, who should know his metaphysics from his materialism, if only because he has had to distinguish between the contrasting mysticisms of Hinduism and Mohammedanism, between the language of Marx and the message of the American millennium, and between the call of Fidel and the killing signals of Macmillan and Sandys, poor Cheddi seemed more bewildered, dislocated and beaten, during Wilson’s lecture and afterwards than at any time in his long political Gethsemane!’

  Saul had been right. There was a sentence. There was Guyana. Poetry and politics. But what had Guyana in the 1970s or the 1990s to do with the expatriate D’Angers? Cheddi Jagan has returned to Freedom House, but Ashcombe, not Eagle Valley, is the D’Anger problem now.

  And what of radon-reeking Ashcombe, what of the secrets of the Haxbys?

  Gogo has no interest in them. Her world has narrowed to the small round of Benjamin’s convalescence. She wakes to worry, she falls asleep to worry. For David too the world has narrowed. The condition-of-England, the condition-of-Guyana, and the conditions of post-colonial cultures worry him yet, but they worry him less than the condition of poor Benjamin. David’s dream of himself as a small stick figure vainly dragging at a vast and heavy carpet has given way to a new vision: he sees the scales of blind and bloody justice held aloft, and in one round burnished dish stand all the heavy peoples, in the other a thin boy. They balance, and the brass bowls tremble. Would he sacrifice the peoples of the world for that child, the Inquisitor asks, the Devil tempts. It is no question, but the vision will not go away. Let us save the one before we try to save the many, a spirit whispers. It is no question, answers David D’Anger to the spirit. But his answer rings thin. What has he been missing, what have his statistics left out?

  Cate Crowe has no such preoccupations. To her the whole Ashcombe débâcle has been an accursed nuisance. An entertaining nuisance, at times, but nevertheless a nuisance. She wants a signature on a contract, she wants a percentage. There is a possibility of serious money here. The film rights of Queen Christina wander in some kind of limbo, and other contracts and tax forms need urgent attention too. Can it be right that a sick sub-teenage boy is to answer for all these decisions? Nobody seems to kn
ow who is responsible for what. And those memoirs that Frieda Haxby was said to be writing–where are they? The obituaries had hinted at interesting liaisons, at unlikely friendships. Had Frieda written anything saleable before she plunged to her watery grave? Is there a typescript at Ashcombe, or in a safedeposit in Exeter?

  Cate Crowe nags, phones, faxes. The Palmer family prevaricate. Yet the Palmer family know that somebody should go to Ashcombe soon, to sort out the papers, to rescue objects of value. An agent has been put in charge of sealing doors and windows against the winter, but one cannot trust a man from Taunton with a literary estate.

  Which of them shall we send? Whose turn is it now?

  As Rosemary observed in our opening pages, it’s one hell of a long way, and since she said that, the weather has been getting worse, the nights longer, and the distance no shorter, although there is a new bypass round one of the villages on the A39. Rosemary refuses to go: she’s done her turn. Daniel is still too busy with his river case. Gogo can’t leave Benjie. Patsy doesn’t see why she should, and, although one of nature’s meddlers, she dares not meddle in this. It is agreed that Nathan, even if he were willing, could not cope with the Englishness of Exmoor. And David D’Anger, who has most reason to go, knows that he cannot. Innocent or guilty, he is no longer trusted by the Palmer clan, and a visit to Ashcombe, even if he could spare the time, would confirm his collusion with Frieda, would exclude him for ever from grace. (If he is not already so excluded. Daniel has not spoken to him since the reading of the wills.)

  Whom does that leave?

  The finger begins to point at Emily. She can easily be reclaimed once more from Florence. She has passed her driving test and is young enough to enjoy driving. She has already demonstrated herself to be an unusually mature and independent young woman. She can be bribed and controlled. She has a lot more sense than Simon, and anyway Simon can’t drive. She can take a friend for company if she wants–she can take her brother Simon for company if she wants–but it is Emily that shall be dispatched. She has always taken a balanced and friendly view of Grandma Frieda. She can go and sort it all out.