The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

  Simon’s unexpected body had to be identified by its fingerprints. He hadn’t washed pleasantly with the friendly tides as Frieda Haxby and Nathan had done; he had been taken out by a lorry as he walked the wrong way along the hard shoulder of the slip-road leading on to the M3 at the exit that leads to Hartley Bessborough and on to the Old Farm. He had been obliterated, smashed, and run over repeatedly, like a fox or a badger, like a cat or a dog or a motorway bird. The lorry had not stopped; nor, it seemed, had some of the cars that followed it. It was a dark wet night with bad visibility–but even so, even so. After the identification of the body, some reports filtered through from motorists who had seen a wild figure walking southwards on the wrong side of the dual-carriageway of the A34, waving its arms like a windmill and lunging occasionally at the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. A drunk, a tramp, a crazed traveller, all had assumed: all, including Judge Partington, who, his licence regained, had been driving himself to a dinner at his old college in Oxford. Greatly to his credit, Bill Partington had not suppressed this sighting, as he so easily might have done, but had reported it as soon as he realized the import of the ghastly apparition: red jersey, some kind of tattered-looking green jacket, dark glasses, fair hair, average height, unsteady gait, carrying a white plastic bag ... Partington was not a bad witness, though this was in itself little comfort to Patsy and Daniel Palmer.

  There was, indeed, little comfort. All they were told, all they could tell themselves, is that he could not have known what had hit him.

  Patsy will never recover from the impact of this blow. Mothers, it is said, do not. Daniel, being a man, appears to take the shock more calmly, but he has become even drier than he was before, and finds no solace save in his work. His smile now has the chill of winter frost. He has sustained a double loss: not only has he lost his only son, through what he himself chooses bitterly to describe as his own contributory negligence, but he has also lost his home, in which he had taken such a proper pride. For it is clear within weeks of Simon’s death that the Palmers cannot continue to live at the Old Farm, unless they live in it as a prison. There is no way to leave the Old Farm without driving along the stretch of road that killed Simon. This they know they cannot do. So they put the house on the market, and wait. The market remains sluggish, as it has been for years, and property prices are low. They may have to wait for a long time. The pond silts up, the lawn is not mown, bindweed embraces the sundial, and ground elder ramps around the roots of the wistaria. Dock and nettles smother the vegetable garden, and greenfly swarm on the roses. Water drips unnoticed through the leak over the study window. The Aga burns still, but Patsy no longer troubles to cook. The Palmers think they will move east, perhaps to Suffolk, to a smaller house, somewhere without memories, without history.

  Patsy’s grief is compounded by her fear that Simon had been making his way home as a first and last plea for help. And he had not reached it. Well, a mother, even a bad mother, would think that, wouldn’t she? She tells this fear to none save harmless, pallid Sonia Barfoot. Sonia accepts the confidence and offers no comfort. Sonia Barfoot is a connoisseur of pain. She accepts, she absorbs, she forgives.

  Would it comfort Patsy Palmer to know that things have turned out better for Will Paine, her surrogate son? Will has fallen on his feet, as he puts it, in Sydney. He is apprenticed to a landscape gardener and he is learning the names of plants. He loves working in the open air. The sun suits him. He is healthier and stronger than he has ever been. He thanks Patsy Palmer for this transformation, and sometimes thinks of sending her a postcard. Without Patsy and Frieda, where would he be?

  We may turn, now, to the D’Angers. They are slowly and painfully on the mend. Slowly, with the professional help of Lily McNab, Benjamin D’Anger rises from the depths, and begins to emerge from the decompression chamber she has constructed for him. David and Gogo watch and wait. Benjamin will never be as he was, omnipotent and brave. He will not take the whole globe on his thin shoulders. He will dive no more into the bottomless. But he will survive. Or so says Lily McNab.

  Gogo finds herself spending more time with her widowed sister Rosemary, who now has time on her hands. They lunch in the hospital canteen, or in a cheap and crowded little Italian trattoria off Queen Square, or in a vegetarian Indian self-service basement restaurant at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road. They talk about their children, their mother, their husbands. They become friends again. They speak of poor Patsy, poor Daniel, poor Simon, and of the admirable character of Patsy’s little Emily, who has grown old before her time. They speak of their strange childhood in the old Mausoleum, and of the damage that it has done to them, and of the games they played in the attic. They speak of poor Aunt Everhilda, whom they had never known, and their poor little nameless half-sister, who had died in a gas oven. They speak, obsessively, at length, of their vanished father, so little mentioned for so long; so many children now are fatherless, but in their day they had been lonely in their special social role. They piece together their fears of the past and for the future, and each time they meet a new pattern emerges, a new seam is stitched. One day they will make sense of their ancestry. Are they unique, are they freaks, are they throw-backs, are they pioneers of a new order? Frieda had left them with so many questions unanswered.

  How wise they had been, they agree, to marry out, to alter the gene pool. Nathan is now enshrined in both their hearts as a hero, and Jonathan and Jess show every sign of inheriting his fine qualities. Rosemary, a reformed daughter-in-law, visits Nathan’s mother weekly with the children, and learns to make chopped liver. She draws the line at gefilte fish, but she improvises an excellent method of turning herrings from the deli into her own version of chopped herring, with the aid of a few turns in the food-processor, some sour cream, an onion and a hard-boiled egg: she imparts the recipe to Mrs Herz. Mrs Herz is delighted with these new attentions. They don’t quite make up for the loss of Nathan, but they certainly do help.

  Rosemary puts the riverside apartment on the market, and then, as soon as a prospective buyer comes to look at it, takes if off again. She has decided to stay where she is, for with Nathan’s life insurance polici es and his company pension she can well afford it. And she has grown fond of the river. It keeps Nathan’s memory alive. She watches the tides at night, as he once watched them, and she feels no ill-will. The river keeps her company. And the neighbourhood, despite the recession, is improving–one day the new gallery will be built, one day the new theatre will be finished. Already a smart new restaurant has opened on the ground floor of the Ceylon Quay: it serves oysters and lobsters, sea bass and seaweed, and its shop sells dark sweet balsamic vinegars and an olive oil of the month. How Nathan would have loved it, Rosemary sometimes sighs.

  Rosemary Herz is to be seen at low tide, standing on the slipway, gazing at the proud painted cast-iron pylons of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, at the huge stained green and white stone piers of the bridge, at the twelve strange red granite columns that march across the water, at the pebbles and pots and pans and shoe soles of the shore, at th‹' gulls and cormorants, at the driftwood barges. Invicta, claims the bridge, with its heraldic horse and its heraldic lion.

  Unvanquished too, in their way, are Gogo and David. Gogo’s marriage adventure had been more daring than Rosemary’s, and it has weathered storms, but is now in clear water. The relationship of Gogo Palmsr and David D’Anger has ever been marked by courtesy and respect; through these dull virtues they have stayed afloat.

  David D’Anger prospers. He is now the elected Member for Middleton, and his party is the party of government. Its majority is slim, but it will serve. David is pleased to have been elected, and by a very respectable margin, for the alternative would have been most unpleasant, but it must be said that he is increasingly disillusioned with party politics and indeed with his own party. It seems to have moved far from where it had stood when David, as an ardent student, had first joined it; it is now, as every journalist says five times a week, almost indistinguis
hable from the opposition. The Just Society recedes over the h orizon, in a haze of talk and compromise and phrase-making. Egalitarianism and redistribution are words to avoid, concepts to deplore. Perhaps, David wonders, he has been wrong all along? Perhaps he should retreat to the cloister of theory, and accept the new Chair of Sociology at Northam University? (It has been offered to him.)

  He cannot quit yet: he must serve his time like a man. And anyway, it is all very fascinating. The customs of the House, its intrigu es, its gossip, its alliances–who would have thought he would ever make it to here? But he finds the composition and lineaments of his constituency of even greater interest than the House. It is a vast living social research project all his own, attending his examination. He resolves to be a good constituency man, to look after his flock like a good shepherd, to chart its structure like a good sociologist. Even if he can’t change much, at least he can record it properly. He will collect statistics that have never been collected before. You can’t push a button and wake up in the new world. But you can pay close attention to the bit that you inhabit. And he has been a very lucky man. He has won Middleton, and he will work for it, and it will work for him. He has been given a licence to nose about in its backstreets, its highstreets, its outlying dormitory villages, its pubs and its nursery schools.

  He resolves to give up his media persona and his TV slots, for: he is finding it increasingly difficult, now he is no longer in opposition, to toe the party line. He does not want to speak out and be dismissed as an ignorant college boy, hijacked by the corner-boys of the hard left. Better to keep his mouth shut, to bide his time. Academe will always take him back.

  News of David D’Anger’s change of tack reaches the Leader, who accosts David casually one day in a corridor of power and asks if it’s true that David has been turning down TV opportunities and discontinued his contract with Race to 2000. Yes, says David. That’s political suicide, says the Leader, smiling his boyish smile. For me or for the party? inquires David. For you, of course, says the Leader, still smiling.

  The Leader is said to be telegenic, but he is not nearly as good-looking as David D’Anger, and he does not have the incalculable positional advantage of being a man of colour.

  David is summoned to a more formal meeting, at which he agrees to accept appearances on named programmes on agreed topics. He reserves his right to refuse Any Questions, Question Time, or anything else that resembles a quiz show. He insists that his manner on such programmes would be in the long run counter-productive–whether for himself or the party, he does not say, and they do not at that point think to ask. But his reply does lead his leaders to wonder what David D’Anger’s view of the long run might be. Is he playing a deep game? What are his political ambitions? Nobody with the gift of the gab like David D’Anger ever refuses to appear on TV. Backbenchers queue up to get themselves on radio phone-ins. David D’Anger is a dangerous man, a man to watch. Who does he think he is?

  So David’s reputation grows, and, as he retreats, he advances.

  Plans for the film of Queen Christina also advance, and Benjamin D’Anger’s fortune augments. It will not be as vast as his parents had at one point feared and hoped, for Frieda, it is discovered, had not invested hundreds and thousands of pounds in high-interest bank accounts, stocks, shares and building societies: the £34,000 in her current account had represented a fair proportion of her liquid assets. The money she scattered so violently upon Will Paine is gone for ever, which is just as well, as it appears to have come from an illegal American bank account on which much tax would have been and indeed may yet be owing. (The position is expensively unclear.) At the time of the sale of the Mausoleum she had already divested herself of various random sums, mainly to old-fashioned, global, respectable charities such as Oxfam and Amnesty International. There were one or two surprises–she had, two years before the sale, and therefore at the height of her dubious relationship with Cedric Summerson, bought £5,000 worth of shares in Grisener International, a conglomerate which owned reputable brand names in the processed food business, and less reputable subsidiaries, including the infamous Hot Snax, manufacturers of Butler’s Bumperburgers. These shares, which she had kept, had done spectacularly well, and would bring in a tidy sum for young Benjamin. Less profitable had been her stake in the Severn Barrage, but even here she had not lost much.

  The bulk of her wealth lies, putatively, in the value of her copyrights, now extended by European law for seventy years from her death. Benjamin’s grandchildren may live to enjoy their profits, and it seems that profits there will be, at least for the next decade. The old classics never go out of print, and continue to appear in several languages. Queen Christina has been given a new lease of life, and may become, who knows, a box office hit, a cult text: there are plans for a paperback tie-in. Of course, the whole enterprise may be a flop, as the hardback had been, but at least it can’t lose money, or not for the Haxby estate. Movies are a gamble, literature is a lottery. Who can tell what time will bring?

  Ashcombe, the trustees agree, is a liability rather than an asset. Are they therefore entitled to dispose of it at a loss? And how much in law and in ethics are they obliged to consult young Benjamin?

  It is clearly in young Benjamin’s financial interest to sell Ashcombe and keep the Hot Snax shares. But is it in his moral interest?

  The trustees discuss this at length, for they do not, it seems, see eye to eye. David D’Anger is in favour of consulting Benjamin, or would have been had Benjamin’s mental state been less precarious, whereas Lord Ogden of Grotius takes the view that it is his prime duty to protect the boy’s legacy and Frieda’s investments. In the matter of Hot Snax, Lord Ogden prevails. David is secretly relieved: nobody can blame him for not standing up to a man of Ogden’s weight, and even David hesitates to assert his right to devalue his own son’s money. Ogden is famed for his shrewd legal and financial brain, and Frieda’s intentions in appointing him had been clear enough. David submits with a good grace, and with a good grace Ogden concedes on the lesser matter of Ashcombe. If David wants to involve the boy in any decisions regarding the house, of course he may.

  David and Gogo think it may be good for Benjamin to apply his mind to Ashcombe. They consult Lily McNab on this: she is professionally reluctant to offer anything as clear as an opinion, but she does not disagree.

  So we may prepare to take leave of Benjamin D’Anger, rich, clever, wise and sad, as he contemplates the prospects of his ruin by the sea. Twice he revisits it, once with his parents in the spring, and again with his cousin Emily in the late summer. Many a time has Emily rehearsed to him the tale of the hind’s flight, and now she tells it once more, as she drives him round the thrilling hairpin bend of Porlock Hill. Benjie listens, absorbed, as he makes his way with much relish through a bag of Maltesers.

  A year has passed since Benjamin paid his first and last visit to his grandmother at Ashcombe. So much has happened since then, reflect he and Emily in mutual silence, as the story of the hunt ends and the car gains the summit and the road flattens and unwinds. Deaths, illnesses, elections. Emily has elected not to go to university this autumn after all; she has given up her place at Newcastle, where she had been accepted to study archaeology, and has chosen instead to take a short course in something called Media Studies in a rechristened polytechnic in Glamorgan. Daniel and Patsy were not pleased by this change of plan, but they are too demoralized as parents even to think of arguing with her. She gave them as her reason that she was ‘sick of the past’, but her real reason is not obvious. (Benjie guesses it; they have an appointment with Bristol Jim the photographer on the way home.)

  Benjamin thinks not about the past, but about the future, as he watches the moor for signs of deer or ponies. The future no longer oppresses him with its black pot lid, its cavern roof of horror, but the way forward and out and up to the light and air is by no means clear to him. He is well aware that Lily McNab has been suggesting to him, over the past few months, that he is not as special, no
r as responsible, nor as predestined as he had thought himself to be. He is not Benjamin, nor Emmanuel, nor Beltenebros. He can choose to be ordinary. Nobody will blame him if he is not the first and the best. He has pretended to go along with her on this, and he has made the same pretence to his parents. But deep in himself he still believes he has a special destiny, and that if he does not find it he will have greatly failed.

  A special destiny, but what shall it be? As squire of Ashcombe, or as saviour of Guyana? There are too many choices.

  His father seems to have become bored by Guyana. He is sunk in the parish pump politics of a not very interesting area of West Yorkshire, or so it sometimes seems. He has abandoned Demerara. (Has Lily McNab, at second hand, been in some way responsible for this? If so, David is not aware of it.) Saul Sinnamary urges Benjamin to return to Guyana, as he himself frequently does, but who wants to spend his one and only life on aeroplanes, in transit, a perpetual tourist, belonging neither to one place nor another? Lily McNab seems to believe Benjamin should abandon dreams of returning, and settle, as she has done, in England, and accept that for better or worse he is British. Angels tempt Benjamin from all sides, and he does not know which are the good ones, which the bad. He must not listen to the wrong voices, but which are they?