The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Emily Palmer,’ says Emily, dazed.

  They gaze at one another, astonished. The young man lifts his camera at her, lets it fall. He is open, eager, unwary. He has learnt no guile. Is he, perhaps, the one?

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, apologizing for his professional reflex.

  ‘That’s OK,’ says Emily. She is panting slightly, with excitement. Her nostrils are dilated, her colour high, her eyes brilliant.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asks the young man.

  'I’m all right,’ says Emily. ‘But I don’t know about him.’

  She indicates the trembling beast, at which she dares not look: she is afraid it is damaged, injured, will have to be put down.

  'Hi’r,’ says the young man. it’s a hind.’

  The manner in which he says this convinces Emily that she has found a friend, and she bursts into tears of shock and relief.

  ‘A hind?’ she weeps. ‘Do they chase hinds?’

  ‘You bet they do. Hinds in calf, hinds with calf. In December they only chase hinds.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ asks Emily.

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ says the young man. ‘Do you mind if I take a pic while I do it?’

  Emily is busy shutting and bolting the windows against the milling confusion of the thwarted throng. The young man kneels gently by the frightened animal, speaks to her quietly, then flashes at her. The beast jerks in alarm, then quivers into stillness.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ says Emily.

  ‘Sorry,’ says the young man.

  The hind seems to be in one piece, but they agree that they will have to keep her indoors until the crowd has gone. Emily says she is afraid the poor thing will die of fright, but the young man says he thinks she will recover. What next? Shall Emily go out and parley?

  ‘We’ll have to get rid of them,’ says Emily. ‘Can’t I tell them just to get off my property?’

  ‘Not as easy as all that,’ says the young man, beginning to look around him with interest, taking in not only the beautiful maiden but also the bizarre decor of skulls and bones of the house she inhabits. ‘The horses can get out, but there’s been an accident in the drive. An Isuzu’s gone over the edge and a lot of other stuff is stuck behi nd it. It’s a scene up there, I can tell you. It’ll take hours to clear.’

  Emily is beginning to calm down, and the animal too seems less distressed. Emily is delighted to hear that the hunt followers have plunged themselves into a muddy impasse, and cross-questions her new friend about how it happened. He assures her there is considerable damage to the drive. ‘Somebody will pay for that!’ declares Emily, glaring angrily through the window at the crowd. She has triumphed over the hunt in every way: it has been utterly routed and wrongfooted. May all its Land Rovers crash after Frieda Haxby into the sea!

  The young man (who has declared himself to be Jim from Bristol) allows her to think that he shares her anti-hunt feelings, which he now does, although he had set out on the day’s chase as a neutral observer. He offers to go out and negotiate with the Master of the Staghounds, and, if Emily will permit him, on his return to take some more pictures. Emily assures him that she can deal with the Master herself, and climbs over the window-sill to do so, leaving Jim in charge of the hind. She confronts them all, boldly. She tells them roundly that they are trespassing, that she gathers they have blocked her drive, and that she is about to ring the police. It is no good their telling her that they thought the house was uninhabited. That is no excuse. They had better get out of her grounds as quickly as they can. And to whom should she send the bill for damage to property?

  The undifferentiated mass of black-jacketed, white-stocked, fawn-breeched, red-nosed, hair-netted, khaki-jacketed, black-booted folk begins to mumble, thin, retreat. Emily tosses her golden mane and scrambles back over her window-sill.

  Jim says it would be better to ring a national paper than the police. He wants to sell the story, and so should she. They compromise: they will ring the press, and the police, and a vet, and Emily will make them both a cup of coffee.

  It takes three hours to clear the drive, and two days for Emily to get back to Wiltshire with the spoils of Ashcombe. By then she has become a small-scale national heroine, for Jim’s pictures have come out uncannily well. He had been following the hunt since the moment the hounds left their kennels, and he has a whole portfolio covering the meet outside the Royal Oak at Moulton, the pursuit over the moor, the lemming leap down the hillside, the overturned Isuzu, the gathering on the lawn, the damsel with upstretched arms at the window, the confrontation of the damsel and the Master. And indoors, he has portrait after portrait of Emily Palmer and of the shy creature she has saved. The hind had not been persuaded to lie down with her head in Emily’s lap, as she had continued to cower behind the sofa amidst the debris of skulls and glass; eventually she had been rescued by a vet from Lynton and an Exmoor Ranger who had managed to coax her into a van, and had promised to release her with the herd. But we were able to see Emily leaning over the back of the sofa, fruitlessly extending an apple; Emily attempting to pat the trembling head; and the delicate head itself, with its lucent, long-lashed, harmless female eyes.

  The vet was of the opinion that she had calved within the last three months. The calf, he optimistically assured Emily, would be running with the herd. He did not tell Emily that the hind was probably suffering from myopathy, leading to excess lactic acid and kidney failure, and might well be pregnant again. His heart and local loyalties were with the hunt, despite the pathos and drama of the brave, lone and desperate flight. He would leave the dirt to the League Against Cruel Sports. They would make a mountain out of it, he guessed.

  They would, they did, and they do, they will.

  Emily does not know what to make of it all. She quite forgets Grandma Frieda in the flurry of her nine-day-wonder notoriety. She is not used to being interviewed, but keeps her cool remarkably well, as a lawyer’s daughter should, and indeed the press does itself credit in some of its descriptions of the event. The connection with Frieda Haxby’s disappearance is not missed, and for the second time in two months remote Ashcombe is in the news. A place of mystery and drama, of legends in the making. There is a particularly stirring piece in one of the quality Sundays by a columnist who had happily been reared in the neighbourhood and who knew all its stories: he retold the old tale of the noble huntsman who had in ancient times pursued a hind across the brow of the moor, up Countisbury Hill, and down through the thickets of the steep hillside towards the sea. At the perilous spot now known as Hindspring Point the hind had paused, glanced backwards at her lone pursuer–for all save the noble knight had fallen back in the chase–and then with three mighty leaps had bounded down the cliff into the sea. There, legend has it, she swam away to the west, across the channel, and out of sight. The penitent knight had marked her tracks, and at each set of the hoofmarks of the hunted beast had planted a stone–three stones which may be seen to this day. They commemorate her valour.

  And what will Emily Palmer raise as monument to the hind which sought sanctuary in her arms? To her grandmother who fell from this cliff?

  Emily Palmer is not sure what she thinks about hinds and hunting, about blood sports and cruelty and conservation. She does not tell the gentlemen of the press that for perhaps two years of her life her greatest desire had been to hunt with the Bessborough Foxhounds, and that for two years she and her friend Sally Partington had talked ponies, dreamt ponies, read about ponies, collected rosettes, studied form, and longed to leap over hedges and ditches and smear themselves with the blood of the stump of the severed brush of the red beast. Their bedrooms had been shrines to the show-ring and the stable, and they themselves had smelt of straw and bran and oatcake and manure. How Simon had sneered, how Daniel and Patsy had yawned! And then all this passion had passed away, and both Emily and Sally had been filled with a transitional shame. Yet the shame, Emily begins to guess now, and will believe later, attached as much to her feelings for Sally Partington as to t
he blood lust of the hunt.

  Sally Partington had graduated from ponies and the clitoral orgasm to unsuccessful attempts at the vaginal orgasm with Simon Palmer. Emily Palmer had given up the lot, had deliberately forgotten and expunged the lot. And now everybody seems to be asking her what she thinks about horses and hunting. She answers very coolly, and gives nothing away. She insists that she is neither saboteur nor fanatic.

  The field is full of ironies. Some of the arguments of the anti-league strike her as unconvincing, and some of its supporters as insupportable: a few of the hunters and hunt followers seem quite nice. (The chivalrous owner of the crashed Isuzu writes her a charming apology and asks her round for tea.) What is one to do? Does one have to have an opinion?

  Animals have no opinions. Animals have no sense of irony. They leap, they run, they tremble.

  Emily the heroine is perplexed. She knows the hind had brought her a message, but what was it? And where is the poor creature now? Did she die from the shock? Did her calf die? Perhaps she should advise Benjamin to turn Ashcombe into a bird sanctuary, a deer sanctuary. As human habitation, it is doomed. Those who stay there must stick or leap.

  Four roods the hart of legend leaped to Hartleap Well, four roods the hind of legend to the sea, and four roods Frieda Haxby fell to her death. The story of Hartleap Well is told by Wordsworth, and it is set in Yorkshire, but many other counties have such legends. (Lincolnshire has one about a blind horse, and it is commemorated at Bayard’s Leap, near Sleaford; Frieda, as we have seen, had been taken to see the giant horseshoes by her father. Brewer says the horseman was Rinaldo, but the locals say he was called Black Jim.) A rood (or a pole, or a perch) is five and a half yards (or five metres) and in early drafts of his ballad Wordsworth had allowed his hart to leap nine roods, not four; in his unromantic, stampmaster old age he scaled down that leap, but maybe he was wrong to do so. In the genre of legend, all things are possible, and exaggeration bears conviction. It is only in this real world that the mud is heavy and sticks.

  Let us liberate Will Paine. Let the bird fly free. Oh, there are many plots that could enmesh and entangle and imprison him, we all know that. The police, the hard men, bad company, the dope, they all lie in wait for Will Paine. Are there any plots that will let him free? Not in this country, that is clear. There is no place for him in the country of his birth. We have sent him a third of the way round the globe already, across the Atlantic billows, but he is not yet safe, he is not yet far enough from us. Can he fly further? With one more bound he may cross the Pacific and reach Sydney. If we send him far away, out of sight and out of mind, as we sent our convicts of old, may he survive and know the good life? We dispatch him now not to hard labour but to the fantasy of a good job with a decent wage. Will they let him in? Will they turn him away at Immigration? He is not very black.

  Fly, bird. Fly, cryptic bird. Take thy flight, thy Qantas flight.

  Sorrow has come upon the Palmers, the Herzes and the D’Angers. They had seemed to be doing so well. It is hard to say which suffers most. Let us ask first for a reckoning of Nathan Herz, to whom we bear no malice, not the least in the world.

  Nathan’s end comes suddenly, unpredictably, on a mild night in spring. He has had a good day at the office, and has dined not wisely but too well at one of his favoured restaurants in Soho, with one of his favoured clients. They have been made much of by the patronne, who loves Nathan, and who has urged upon him perhaps one glass of Armagnac too many. The liquor had rested warmly upon the ravioli aux trompettes des morts, the pieds de pore Sainte-Menehould, the Caprice des Dieux, and Nathan and his friend Baxter, Marketing Controller of Associated British Unit Plan Trusts, sat long over the filter coffee, exchanging notes on the state of the economy, the old days of their youth, their sex lives, their livers, their loathing of exercise. Nathan and Baxter are old drinking companions, bonded by the bottle, and they share a contempt for the nineties cult of self-regarding health, for the regimes of gyms and jogging and personal aerobic tutors and mineral waters. Why pay good money to run up and down a short flight of stairs to nowhere? They know they are in a minority (which is why the patronne, herself of an older and more indulgent generation, loves them so much) but they are defiant. They admire the Bohemians of earlier days who drank themselves to death. Why do people want to live so long? It is unnatural. What makes them think it’s worth it?

  Nathan feels on this good night that he has no worries at all. Even when he visits the gents, pisses copiously, then has to reach for the wall as he senses a sudden constriction in his chest, he still feels no worry. Conviviality courses through him. He loves the patronne, and kisses her goodnight. He loves Baxter, and they clasp hands and hug one another at the end of Greek Street, as Baxter hails a cab. Even now, Baxter suggests a drinking club, but Nathan declines–he is feeling a little odd down his left arm and elbow, and although the distant, almost disembodied sensation causes him not the slightest anxiety, he thinks perhaps he should be sensible and get himself home. He too hails a cab, and sets off south to the other side of the river.

  This proves to be a mistake. He should have stuck with Baxter and the booze.

  As the cab crosses the bridge, Nathan asks it to stop, and tells it he’ll get out here and walk the last few hundred yards along the river path. This also proves to be a mistake.

  He tells himself that he needs a breath of air, that the closeness of the restaurant (which, anachronistically, encouraged smoking) has stifled him. As he tries to count out his money, he finds he is very pissed, unaccountably pissed, for he cannot tell one banknote from another. In the end he hands over a fistful of paper currency and tells the driver to help himself to the fare, keep a quid, and hand back the rest. The driver does as he is told, for he is a thoroughly decent old-fashioned cabbie, and an Eastender to boot. The driver watches with some concern as Nathan weaves his way towards the steps down to the towpath. That is the last time that anyone admits to seeing Nathan alive.

  Nathan is fished out quite promptly the next morning, and the events of his last evening on earth are subjected to close scrutiny, even before it is discovered that he had suffered a mild heart attack. The heart attack might explain his death, but how can it explain why Nathan was standing at the bottom of a cobbled slipway with his feet in the Thames when he toppled over? Does it explain why he left his briefcase placed so neatly on the sixth step of the stone stairs leading down to the beach and the slipway, just above the reach of a high tide? No, it does not. There will have to be an inquest.

  Rosemary is at first embarrassed by the vast amount that Nathan and Baxter Coldstream seem to have eaten and drunk at their last supper, and by the detailed account from patronne, fellow diners and cab-driver of Nathan’s staggering last hours. Those pigs’ feet, so retro, so gross, so indigestible, so monstrously non-kosher, cause mirth even in a coroner’s court, and the coroner makes a point of dwelling upon them. But Rosemary rallies and wins through. Even the laughter had been full of admiration. Rosemary decides to be proud of Nathan, not ashamed of him, and once she had adopted this policy it is as though the lock upon her heart is opened and the flow of her old love for him released. She is proud of his exploits. He has done well.

  She is fortified in this position by the sincere and extravagant gestures of affection which greet her on all sides. His colleagues claim they will miss him horribly, and they shower her with flowers and other tokens of esteem. The flat by the Thames is transformed into a conservatory in memory of Nathan Herz. Bouquets with mysterious messages arrive from unknown ladies, and Rosemary decides to greet these too with pride. (The Eagleburgers send a case of champagne: is this or is this not in poor taste?)

  Rosemary is invited to dinner by Baxter Coldstream, and they dine in the very restaurant where Nathan had consumed his last trotter. Baxter drunkenly implores her not to blame him, and tells her that he blames himself for not insisting on taking Nathan to Carlucci’s.

  And it is true that if Nathan had opted for common sense and an
earlier night he would not have ended up in the river. What can he have been doing, down there at the water’s edge? Can it have been a suicide attempt? This, to the relief of all, is finally ruled out. Nathan had nothing to commit suicide about, confirm his boss, his colleagues, his friends, his wife, his mother, his stockbrokers. Since Christmas, life had been looking good for Nathan. He had come up with an acceptably risque and imaginative plan for health insurance, he had braved the invoicing of the forgotten clients and been warmly forgiven, he had been given a clean bill at his last medical, and he had won five hundred quid on a tip on a horse at Lingfield. What more could a creative director in a rising advertising agency want? Had he known something about the market that nobody else knew? Had he had a secret grief?

  Baxter, holding Rosemary’s freckled hand over the Armagnac, and squeezing it until her widowed diamonds pinch, assures her that never had Nathan been in better spirits. They had had a cracking evening, a smashing evening. Nathan hadn’t had a care in the world. They’d reminisced about their first meeting at Sharp MacManus all those years ago, and about the night they’d spent carousing after it with Nathan’s old college pal, the night they’d ended up in Bow Street. And had Rosemary ever heard the story of the Combined Biscuit Christmas Party?

  Rosemary, who has for years fastidiously avoided male tales of debaucherie and camaraderie, who has avoided many a company function, listens with new-found longing, with sympathy reborn. He had been quite a lad, her Nathan. She and he had had good times together too. Baxter is right, one must remember the good times. She sniffs, her nose turning pink with emotion, and returns the pressure of Baxter’s fingers. She will miss Nathan. Somewhere beyond the comforting pleasures of this wake lies lasting loss.

  But Rosemary’s sorrow, ameliorated by recaptured love, will be as nothing to the sorrow and horror of Daniel and Patsy Palmer. Nathan Herz’s death was one of happy ease in comparison with the violent death of Simon Palmer. How had his parents not seen the warning signals? Where had they been looking, as Simon descended into the pit? Will Paine could have told them, had once even tried to warn them, but he is not here. Emily had observed symptoms, but even the cool, the sensible Emily had not seen how far things had gone. She too had looked the other way. Simon’s tutor (who happened, alas, for these crucial weeks to double as his personal tutor) has been too preoccupied with his own worries to pay Simon much attention–and anyway, all that loco parentis stuff had seemed to him old hat. If the idle young of the idle rich wanted to spend their time tripping, hallucinating, needling or ghetto-blasting, what was that to him? Half of them were schizoid anyway. Simon Palmer had almost certainly been schizoid. The only papers he’d even managed to turn in had been disorganized and demented. Hardly worth the marking.