The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Emily accepts the suggestion without protest. Once again she is flattered by the faith which others have in her, though she wonders in passing if she has been cast too readily for life as a responsible adult. She says she’d be happy to go alone. She does not say that she would hate to go with Simon, cannot think of a worse companion than Simon.

  Everyone is delighted with her. She is flown home Business Class, and sips champagne and nibbles canapés over the Alps. She is becoming a seasoned traveller.

  Daniel and Patsy press upon her money, keys, advice, a mobile telephone. She must spend the night in comfort in the best hotel the coast can offer, and ring them–they give her multiple, variant numbers, for they will do anything but go there themselves–if she has any queries. She must bring away any portable valuables, and Frieda’s computer. On the way back, she should report to the estate agent at Taunton, who has offered to provide some kind of surveillance of the property. She must not walk along the coast path. And, says Daniel repeatedly, with unusual paternal solicitude, she must not stay in the house too long, getting cold and damp and breathing in the mildew. She must wrap up warm.

  Emily is pleased and amused by all this attention. She is impressed that she is being offered Daniel’s BMW instead of Patsy’s muddy Datsun.

  On the night of her departure she rings Benjie, because she knows that Benjie knows some of Frieda’s secrets. Benjie, she thinks, sounds dreadful, his voice mean, flat and pinched, but he manages to say that there is some stuff in the butler’s pantry, some wooden animals in a shoe box and some old fossils. They are for him. He wants them. She’d better bring them now or they’ll get chucked out, he says.

  He does not say that everything is for him, although she knows he knows it.

  She is surprised by his request. Has he reverted to some kind of playground infancy, that he keeps requesting from her children’s games? Is this part of his breakdown? And she is surprised when, as they say goodbye, he mutters, ‘I say, Em, have you ever been down Wookey Hole?’

  She denies all knowledge of Wookey Hole and the Cheddar Caves, but in the morning checks her map and sees that they are on her route. On the way back, perhaps?

  HINDSPRING

  Emily sets off early, the keys to Ashcombe dangling importantly from the car key-ring, and drives westwards. It is a glorious day, one of those brilliant winter days when the sun shines from an azure lightly streaked with small white high faraway tendrils of cirrus cloud. It is cold at first, but she fancies it grows milder and warmer, or is that the car’s excellent heating system, which purrs so comfortably around her feet and knees? She feels a powerful disembodiment at the wheel of her father’s car, as she crosses the counties. Hitch-hikers solicit her, bearing placards requesting the M5, Plymouth, Exeter, but she ignores them, cherishing her solitude, listening to the radio, flicking channels imperiously from Mozart to Manilow, from Kiss to Classic, from disc jockey and Car Marts to discussions of the clitoral orgasm. The world is hers, and this is England. She eats sandwiches from a plastic box guiltily packed by Patsy, and drops crumbs upon her navy sweatshirt. She is young, she is weightless. She has no cares. She has an admirer, in the ancient city of Florence, who says he adores her, but she is free of heart. She sometimes allows him intimate caresses, but not very often. He is not the one. Technically, she is a virgin, although she is well acquainted with the clitoral orgasm, which she had discovered many years ago with the active participation of Sally Partington. She has liked Florence, and her course in Art History, and her language classes, and her new friends, and the striped buildings. But she lives in an interlude. All things are yet possible to her. She drives on, at eighty miles an hour, to meet them, through the levels, past the headlands, past the glittering high horizon of the sea.

  The last stretch of coast road is of spectacular beauty. The sky above is still dazzling, but over the Bristol Channel below her, to her right, lies a fleece of white cloud, sucked up from the sun from who knows where, from the moorland, from the water. It rolls in innocent bundles. sparkling with light, and she flies above it, marvelling. To her left is the browned moorland, pricked yellow here and there with gorse, coloured a paler brown with the dried fawn cusps and bells of the heather, glowing with the bronze of bracken: single thorn trees with a haze of red berries lean here and there from the prevailing wind. To her right is this sea above the sea, this strange and soft illusion. She knows that Wales lies out there across the channel, but although visibility seems infinite, she cannot see it. She feels she has created the world afresh. No one has ever seen this world before.

  The road unwinds before her and it glitters blue like water, blue like a thin high flowing river, as the tarmac reflects the sky. High carved copper hedges enclose her for a while and sheep graze unmoved by the roadside. A cluster of ponies lift heads to watch her. Will she see deer on the hillside?

  She slows, as she begins to look for the turning, for the track where Will Paine had climbed down from the abattoir lorry. They had warned her, her parents, about the steepness of the descent; she goes into bottom gear, which is so severe that the car hardly moves at all. So this was where Grandma Frieda had hidden herself! She crawls slowly, bumping over boulders, avoiding ruts. Either she must get back up in the daylight, or she must spend the night here. Has she the courage to spend the night in a haunted house? Ought she to put herself to such a test?

  The door is reluctant to open, for the wood is swollen, but the key has turned easily, and she yanks and yanks until it gives way. The house is less cold than she had expected, and she discovers some overnight off-peak storage heaters that have been left on permanently. So electricity is still connected. She explores the ground floor, opening the door of the well-stacked freezer, admiring the row of gumboots, touching the skull, the dried orange, the packs of playing cards portraying the defunct monarchy of France. She finds the butler’s pantry and the wooden animals and the jewel cases. There are large, thin-legged, small-bodied spiders everywhere: she does not much care for them, though she accepts their claims of residence. And when she opens one of the sidedoors on to the courtyard, she finds a toad sitting patiently upon the doorstep, as though waiting to enter. It is one of the strangest sights she has ever seen. It looks up at her, she would swear with a question. Its head on one side, it leans inquisitively towards her: it sits its ground.

  ‘Hello,’ she says, from some profound instinct of politeness. The toad does not answer, but it takes a small hop forwards. She is charmed by this. ‘Come in, come in,’ she says to the intelligent beast, and it hops in and on to the stone-flagged corridor. Does it know where it is going? Shall she leave the door open in case it wishes to leave? What are her social obligations to this visitor?

  The toad hops along the corridor with gainly, neat, jointed propulsion. It is making for a cellar door, which stands ajar. It turns to look at her, before it disappears around the corner.

  Emily is enchanted by this meeting. She is on friendly terms with the animal kingdom, and toads and newts and frogs and water-creatures have always given her delight. Many hours of her childhood she had spent gazing into the fishpond at the Old Farm, or with a jam jar by the chalky water-crowfoot-blossoming brook, which runs through the water meadows. She knows the toad is a friend. Was it also a friend of Frieda’s?

  Carefully she makes her way up the rickety stairway, to search the upper floors: how glad she is that Simon is not with her! For Simon is as afraid of beasts as she is delighted by them. He holds frogs, toads and snakes in especial horror. She knows he has reptile nightmares. Drug dreams are worse than delirium tremens, she has heard, but why incriminate, why demonize such sweet and mild-mannered fellow beings? Poor Simon, she fears he is lost.

  She gazes from the upper floor, over the water. The blanket of clouds has lifted now, and she can see the distant shore. The light is beginning to fade, though it is noticeably brighter here in the west than it would have been at Stonehenge, at Old Sarum. She must be sensible, she must make a quick reconnaissance
up here, then get the big car back up the drive and check in at her Country House Hotel with special Four Course Dinner before nightfall. ‘Pamper yourself,’ the hotel’s advertisement had urged her, and she looks forward to a night’s pampering. She can come back in the morning, she tells herself. She pushes open Frieda’s bedroom door.

  Emily Palmer never checks into the Blackmoor Court Hotel. She does not answer her mobile telephone. Has she plunged from the cliff, or fallen down the staircase? Has she driven the car into a ditch, or been murdered by a hitch-hiker?

  No, she is sitting in one of the upstairs rooms at Ashcombe. It is late at night and her lofty light shines across the waters from the uncurtained windows. She is transfixed. She is mesmerized by Frieda Haxby’s computer and its arcane messages.

  She had begun to play with it in the afternoon, and now she cannot stop, although the sky is dark and the North Star shines above her. She has found herself coffee in ajar, and everlasting milk in a waxy cardboard carton, and a tin of baked beans, and sweet soft musty biscuits in a plastic box. She has plugged in a small fan heater which blows hot air on to her booted ankles. She has draped an old plaid blanket round her shoulders. She has poured herself a small glass of Madeira.

  Frieda’s secrets had been easy to unravel, for Frieda had written herself many messages. The walls of the computer room are covered in messages, attached with drawing pins and tape. Some are in red felt pen–lines of verse, shopping lists. There are lists of operational instructions for the computer–passwords, key words, names of files and documents. There are one or two newspaper cuttings pinned up, over which Emily had paused briefly–an article from Nature about the possibility of life breeding without photosynthesis from basalt in deep water, an obituary of the actor Patrick Fordham, which Frieda had decorated with exclamation marks. There is a translated Icelandic rune, which reads

  Wealth is the source of discord among kinsmen

  And the fire of the sea

  And the path of the grave-fish

  There is a photograph of Benjamin as a baby, and postcards showing a view of Stockholm, a painting of a death ship with black sails, Napoleon on a beach in a red sunset, a harbour at Tenerife.

  Emily had not spent much time on these leavings and jottings, for she knew the important material would be in the computer.

  Emily had been surprised to find that Frieda Haxby was on E-Mail. And her family had not even known she was on the telephone. Emily had accessed her E-Mail correspondence without much difficulty, for Frieda’s instructions to herself had been easy to follow. For the month before her death, Frieda had been communicating with scholars in Cambridge, in Viborg, in Bellagio, in Uppsala, in Mannheim, in Sofia. In the bin Emily found letters about the Swansberg Stone, about Descartes, about Grotius, about Beowulf. Frieda had been wired, formidably wired. Her mind like a lighthouse, her mind like a beacon.

  And Emily has found Frieda’s memoirs. She has found various accounts of Frieda’s childhood, some of them contradictory, and now she is searching for the story of her Great Aunt Everhilda’s death. Emily Palmer’s hair glints red-gold in the lamplight. Wrapped in her plaid rug, she is an Iron Age maiden, safe in her hillfort: a Highland lass, the last of her race. She is plugged in, across the millennia.

  Frieda writes:

  ‘Now Will Paine has finally been dislodged, I’m going to have one more attempt at writing about Hilda’s death. And if I can’t do it this time, I give up, and I’D go back to playing patience. Or maybe I’ll go back to town, for the winter. Why not, after all? I don’t have to stay here, do I?

  ‘I can’t remember how long ago it was that I realized that Hilda had forced me and Andrew together. She need never have introduced us. But she threw us together. Night after night, in the black-out, when she was on night-shift. I thought I was outwitting her by making up to him, but she was outwitting me. She’d plotted it all. She wanted me to incriminate myself. Remember, I was only sixteen. And the war made people sexually voracious. We didn’t want to die before we’d done It. I remember talking about it endlessly at school. And who else was I going to do it with but Andrew? I thought I was stealing him from her, but really she procured me for him. Did she know what she was doing? I don’t know. But that’s what happened. Andrew seduced me, one night in that room in her digs in Wolverton, in her bed. Or I seduced him. I wanted to prove something. I wanted to prove I wasn’t just the clever one. I was sick of being the clever dull one. And I wanted It. I suppose I must have wanted Andrew, though I can’t remember what it felt like to want him. Because then I wanted to get rid of him. But by then I was married.

  ‘And to think that for all those years Andrew and Hilda were carrying on behind my back, and that I suspected nothing. Nothing. I swear to God that until those last weeks I had no idea that they ever saw one another, except under my roof. I must have been pig stupid. I must have been bat blind, worm blind. I can’t tell you how I hate, even now, at my age, to admit how much I hated to look ridiculous. I was so proud. And they had made such a fool of me. The;/ had deceived me, and I’d been too busy, too indifferent, too stupid to notice. When other people tell you stories like this you don’t believe them. And maybe it’s not true that they were carrying on all that time. Maybe it was an on-and-off affair. All those years of on-and-off.

  ‘And to think that I thought my sexual life was over. Because that’s the other strange thing. While Hilda was alive, I never even thou ght of being unfaithful to Andrew, although he was such a disappointment, and I was so frustrated. Because, let’s face it, he was no good in bed at all, although he wanted it. I had to do all the work. Why did I persist, through three children? Pride, again. I had to prove I could. Those three children of mine are all his, in case anyone ever questions it. Well, you can tell they are from looking at them. And Hilda’s baby was his too, if looks are anything to go by. So despite all he must have had a high sperm count. People did, in those days. Even queers like Andrew.

  ‘Hilda’s death released me, and I knew it had the moment I saw her. It freed me from her, it freed me from Andrew. So I should be grateful to her for doing herself in. Maybe I am. It pulled the veil from my eyes. Was that what she intended? No, I don’t think so. Or not in that sense, anyway. She wanted to hurt me. She wanted to blind me. But my eyes adjusted, and here I am, and she is more than thirty years dead.

  ’I said I’d try to write about her death, and so I will. I don’t know if I can put it in my memoir.

  ‘When Andrew and I were married and living in Romley, when I was slogging my guts out teaching and lecturing and working on Matriarchy and the Iron Works, and getting myself pregnant, and falling asleep upright like a workhorse at the bus stop, Hilda used to come and see us from time to time. The pretence was that we were friends again, but we knew we didn’t trust one another an inch. And I used to put on a good front with Andrew, making him put his best foot forward, boasting about his prospects, hiding his drinking, laughing off his drinking. Anyway, I didn’t give a damn about his drinking. Hilda was drifting from job to job, she didn’t seem to stick at anything. She was jealous of my success, or so I imagined. At last I’d got the upper hand, I’d got a career and a man and three children. I wasn’t going to show her that I hated it, that I was empty with dissatisfaction. I’m amazed now I had the energy to feel empty. You’d have thought I wouldn’t have had time. But I knew I’d been cheated. I’d cheated myself.

  ‘I used to nag at her for not going to see Ma. I tried to make out that she’d nothing better to do than to go and see Ma. No wonder she hated me. But then she’d always hated me. Since the day I was born.

  ‘I used to wonder why she’d never got married. She, the pretty one. With her which-twin-is-the-Toni permanent waves.

  ‘Then she went off to Rotterdam, to work for a shipping company. Or that’s what she said. She’d had such a stupid succession of jobs, like so many women after the war. Genteel jobs, ladies’ jobs, though we were no ladies. Tea-shops, photographer’s receptionist, the lighting d
epartment at Selfridges, answering the telephone at the Halifax Building Society. How could she have gone back into all that, when she’d had some kind of proper job at Bletchley Park? Not that I ever found out what she did there. Official Secrets, she wouldn’t say. But they must have trained her to do something, after she was called up. Maybe that’s how it was, in those days. The men came back from the war and the women were put out of work. Well, I of all people know that’s how it was, because that’s what I was working on at the time with my LSE grant, but you don’t expect your own sister to behave like a statistic. I thought she was smarter than that.

  ‘So off she went, out of sight, out of mind. That must have been just after I’d had Rosemary. There was still rationing, I think. Fair deals for all. Sweet coupons. It was a mistake, having three children. It was a mistake having any. I can’t think why I did. I never really meant to. They just happened. I wouldn’t have called myself the maternal type. In fact I know I wasn’t. They were a problem. Think what I might have been, might have done, if I hadn’t been burdened. It’s a mystery. No use my complaining about Hilda not knowing what she was doing when I didn’t know what I was doing myself. I suppose if I hadn’t had them I’d always have wondered what it would have been like if I had. But I never thought motherhood was all it was cracked up to be. Daniel was a hideous baby. Dark red and blue. I remember looking at him and thinking, “What is that?” Grace wasn’t much better. Rosemary was the only reasonably pretty one, and look what she turned into.’