Spiderweb

by Penelope Lively

  The phone rings. It is Mary Binns, who greets Stella effusively and says that she just needs a quick word with Judith, if it isn’t too much of a nuisance. Judith, returning to the table after a brief exchange, looks sheepish and explains that Mary wants her to pick up some groceries on the way back. It is silently understood that the issue is that of the establishment of possession, not a stop-off at Tesco.

  ‘You’d better not leave it too late,’ says Stella. ‘Or you’ll hit the rush hour.’

  ‘Huh …’ says Judith. ‘Trying to get rid of me, are you?’

  Back in the Malta days there had been someone called Rosie – a nut-brown girl as wiry, fiery and maverick as Judith, so that she seemed some kind of providential clone. Stella, herself emotionally preoccupied, had enjoyed their company and felt a benign empathy. But Rosie had vanished and now there was Mary Binns, and Stella would not presume to ask how Mary Binns had come about. Or what had happened to Rosie. But in her mind’s eye she sometimes sees Rosie and Judith, sprawled in the shade of an olive tree, drinking red wine – vibrant, sun-baked, light-years from today and a Bristol branch of Tesco.

  Judith gathers herself to leave. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I can see you’re nicely dug in. Incidentally, I’m still not quite clear why you plumped for here rather than anywhere else.’

  Stella hesitates. ‘Happenstance, I suppose. Richard Faraday sent me stuff from an estate agent – you remember Nadine, my old college chum? And I came this way once with Dan.’

  ‘Pure fluke,’ says Judith. ‘So it goes. That’s how we all live. Now for a bout with Tesco … See you soon.’

  But when she has gone Stella looks again – back to that olive grove of the sixties – and sees that it is not so at all. She sees that time as inextricably entwined with this one. They are both woven into a tapestry, united by an inevitable thread of circumstance. There is a fourth figure present on the day of the olive-tree picnic, he who will subsequently say, ‘Anywhere … so long as it’s somewhere rural and blindingly English.’ The roof under which she now lives was already hinted at then, along with the line of hills at which she looks, along with the metamorphosis of herself. Not happenstance, she thinks, not happenstance at all, but the way that the future is implicit within the present, did one but know. The signals are already there but we cannot read them.

  Stella was finding that she lived now on two planes. There were all the familiar references of her own past and present, tapped into daily by way of visitors such as Judith, by letters and phone calls. But there was also this new backcloth, this social and physical landscape of which she was now an element. She eyed it with interest, and saw that she in turn was watched.

  She talked, she walked, she drove. She looked and she listened. She did what she had always done in pursuit of her work and would now be incapable of not doing – she noted everything she saw or heard, and the place began slowly to take on a further dimension. The invisible swam into sight, like the hidden shapes in a child’s magic drawing book.

  First she learned her way around. She visited Minehead and Dunster and Williton and Watchet. She learned the structure of the place, its systems of linkage and dependence. She saw what people were doing now and she dipped into the ubiquitous past, proffered in the form of brochures and pamphlets and murky postcards, to discover what they used to do. She wandered around villages, read the names on the war memorials, leafed through the local papers and saw the same names. She pottered in churchyards. She followed footpaths around the edges of the fields, along mysterious sunken tracks or over bracken-covered hillsides. She drove down lanes that became green tunnels between the high hedgebanks. She pored over the map, which served up names that could have furnished some pastiche of a perished country-side: Dumbledeer, Felon’s Oak, Sticklepath. And wherever she went, whenever she could, she fell into conversation – sometimes with people she would never see again, sometimes with those who became a circle of acquaintance.

  A couple in a pub at Watchet told her that they’d thought it would be more like Ilfracombe, and these narrow roads were a menace. A potter in an Exmoor village (every village had its craftsperson, she soon realized) had fetched up there after spells in Crete and Provence and thought the light was amazing, but had to avert her eyes every time the hunt passed by.

  The postman told her much. The postman bore a Welsh name – his forebears had probably crossed the Bristol Channel to work in the iron mines up on the Brendon Hills. He told Stella who was married to whose sister and which farmer’s daughter worked at the NatWest in Williton and why the agreeable cottage on the edge of the village was falling into decay (an executors’ dispute over ownership). He defined the neighbourhood. He told her who was a bona fide product of this place and who was not. She saw herself defined as he spoke.

  And thus Stella learned. There came beams of light. The place took shape. It ceased to be a landscape, a backdrop, and became an organism. Stella perceived the intricate system of checks and balances by which things worked. She saw that there was a continuous state of negotiation, of dealing, of to-and-fro arrangements. Everyone stood in a particular relationship to everyone else, often literally so in terms of marriage connections or distant ties of blood. People employed one another, or sold things to each other, or exchanged services, or simply rubbed shoulders here, there and everywhere. Each casual encounter in a lane or at a shop entrance reinforced this subtle and elaborate system, as hard to penetrate as any she had met.

  For there were two layers here, she saw. There was the basic and significant layer, which went back a long way – two, three or more generations. These were the people whose parents and grandparents looked out from here and who continued to do so themselves, for whom these parts were the hub of things and elsewhere was … elsewhere. Though, admittedly, a rather more familiar elsewhere nowadays, thanks to several decades of mass communications and package holidays. But grafted on to this layer was a further one, the layer of subsequent settlement – some of it transitory, some more permanent. Most transitory of all were the summer visitors – a valuable source of revenue for some, a confounded nuisance for others. Then there were the more abiding setders – the retired, the owners of holiday cottages, the potters and the woodcarvers and the weavers. These were digested, up to a point and depending upon their personal achievements in terms of participation and commitment. But they would never be truly attuned. They would never be able to plug into the elaborate communication system which hinged upon intimate knowledge of how things stood, how things had changed and why, and what this implied in terms of expedient response and reaction. They would always tramp around wearing blinkers. They would always speak with a foreign accent.

  Stella moved warily amid these intricate connections. People were willingly communicative. It is not entirely true that the English are a grudging lot, mean with their favours. If the approach is considered sufficiently harmless or even congenial, there is no stopping them. And a woman in late middle age is the most neutral figure of all, Stella discovered. She poses no sexual threat nor challenge. For young men, she is of so little interest as to be effectively invisible. For women younger than herself, she is a comforting reminder that they have not themselves got that far yet, thanks be. For those around her own age, she is a reassurance: we are not alone. Accordingly all three groups are reasonably well disposed, the defences are down, an overture will be accepted with equanimity and in some quarters with enthusiasm.

  Stella realized that she had been too young, back then. She had been too young out there in the field, as anthropology so bizarrely calls the baffling world at which it stares, introducing overtones of botanical study. She had been too young in the Delta and in Malta and Greece and even Orkney. She had been still a viable woman, with all that that implies. As soon as she stepped into view, the waters were muddied by the implications of age and gender. Both men and women wondered how it was possible for her to be doing this. Men might wonder if she was available, or alternatively if she was to be taken seriously. Wo
men did not know whether to pity her or to envy her. It was not feasible for her to be perceived with neutrality. Her foreign status was one thing, her age and gender were another and equally to be taken into consideration.

  Now that it was too late, she found herself with this protective camouflage. West Somerset would cheerfully bare its soul to her. She had only to get talking at a bus stop or supermarket check-out, share a table in a pub, stop to chat at a filling station. Her credentials were instantly apparent: agreeably spoken, no spring chicken, origins uncertain but that’s what you expect these days. Nothing to be lost in a passing exchange (though probably nothing to be gained either).

  It was too late, in terms of her trade. She had not the slightest desire to set about some neat little study of kin groups and systems of integration in a rural community. But in another sense it was not too late at all. This new persona was thrust upon her – like most people she felt ambushed by time – but since it had to be, there were certain advantages, she saw. The old and the young are washed to the margins of life – unessential and dependent. They share only the opportunity for untrammelled observation. And for Stella observation had been her way of life.

  Certainly, the wider landscape offered more rewarding scope for both observing and sampling some kind of community life than the small enclave of the hamlet along the lane, where she had little to do with her neighbours. The old couple next door occasionally emerged as far as the gate, in which case a few words were had. The farmer would bestow a perfunctory grin and wave from his tractor. Karen Hiscox would wind down the window of her car to hand out some piece of advice – ‘If you need your vehicle seen to, don’t go to that place on the crossroads, they’ll do you down’ – or indulge in a fleeting assault on the pleasures of family life: ‘ … with boys, and especially with boys of that age, you make it clear who’s boss and no nonsense, if you know what’s good for you – that’s me, and frankly my husband doesn’t want to know, off on a job as soon as there’s a problem.’ The weekenders would call energetic greetings if they saw her in the course of one of their noisy, child-encumbered walks.

  It was a far cry from her professional experience. She remembered the dawn to dusk interactions of the Delta village, of Greece, of Malta. The old men sitting on a bench under a tree. The street corners on which there was forever a knot of talking women. The informal conference centre that was the shop or the coffee house. The comments and interrogations shouted from doorways. The small excursions on foot from here to there for no particular purpose other than to see who might be around. The house to house visits in pursuit of information or for the exchange of commodities or to pass on some succulent piece of news. In other words, the fervent face to face community life of a world largely innocent of cars and telephones, for better or for worse. What have we come to? thought Stella.

  At the same time, she noted the ambiguity – the downright hypocrisy perhaps – of her own response. Would she wish to live like that herself? Is she, indeed, attempting to live like that now that the opportunity is offered? Well, no. She, too, retreats behind her closed door and into the protective shell of her car, from which a wave and a smile will suffice. Her professional life has been that of a voyeur, her interest in community has been clinical. She has wanted to know how and why people get along with each other, or fail to do so, rather than sample the arrangement herself. She has been simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Moving around the world, she was always alert, always curious, but comfortable also in the knowledge that, in the last resort, this was nothing to do with her. Indeed, casting a cold eye back, it now seems to her that she and her like can be seen as parasites. Intellectual parasites.

  But she was after something more than observation. She was no longer in the business. Now was the time to prove herself. Even if she could not hope to melt into the ancient levels of this place, even if the immediate community of the lane was a touch unpromising, there were still slots into which she could fit in the wider context. Join things, she told herself sternly. As advocated by Richard. Participate. You are still carrying around a mental notepad and pen – trash them. Join the human race. After all, it is your subject.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘But it would be neither local nor history,’ Stella protested.

  Richard Faraday sighed. ‘Ten meetings a year. We have already wrung dry the possibilities of the Brendon Hill iron mines, the pre-history of Exmoor, the Bristol Channel shipping trade … The net gets thrown wide, by necessity. Last year we had someone’s cruise on the waterways of Russia, with accompanying video, and an account of plant-collecting in the Himalayas by a retired curator from Kew. Both warmly received. You would be a star turn. Please, Stella.’

  ‘Oh, well…’ she said. Then, ‘Are you the treasurer?’

  ‘I’ve recently been elected secretary. The dogsbody role. Hence my plea.’

  ‘All right. If I must. “Lineage structures in the Nile Delta” or “Neighbourhood and community in a Maltese village”?’

  ‘I think …’ Richard hesitated. ‘If you could frame it rather more as a… perhaps a sort of travelogue. Would this feel like professional degradation?’

  ‘By no means,’ said Stella. ‘I shall look on it as a challenge.’

  The local history society met in the village hall, a small wooden building perched at the edge of a recreation ground. Chairs had been arranged in a group at one end of the room, near to the table with the tea urn, an attempt to domesticate a space which seemed to invite gym displays or flower shows rather than discussion.

  ‘Don’t be daunted by the size of the audience,’ said Richard Faraday, greeting Stella at the door. ‘Fifteen is par for the course. These are the hard-core members, the enthusiasts. I’ll introduce you all round before we start.’

  Identities swam forward. The sprightly woman in her fifties farmed on the Quantocks. The silver-haired man in a blazer who was helpfully adept at setting up Stella’s slide equipment was a retired teacher. That familiar face was the lady who ran the plant nursery in a nearby village. The young couple were potters from the craft centre ten miles away. The two teenagers so valiantly attending were doing A-level history. They would have to put this occasion down to experience, poor dears, thought Stella.

  She had decided to talk to them about the baffling nature of cultural identity, basing the discussion around the proposal that interpretation is distorted by expectations. To this end, she had brought along a selection of slides which would illustrate her point, provide diversion and serve as the required travelogue. Once the group was settled, with cups of tea in hand, and the projector proved to be functioning properly, she gave a short introduction. The social anthropologist, she told them, studies human societies in order to understand more about how we behave by recording the range of differences in social behaviour and organization. But the anthropologist, like anyone else, is governed by his or her own beliefs and expectations, and has to learn how to sidestep these for penetration of the codes of the society under study. She treated them to a few illustrative anecdotes from her own experience, explaining that her specialism was lineage patterns and kinshipstructures. ‘There is plenty of existing material on this for comparative studies, but I never wanted to be a desk anthropologist – I always wanted to get out there into the thick of it.’ People’s expressions went from that of polite neutrality to something warmer. They glimpsed Stella as someone younger, more exotic and more provocative, who had lived in a mud hut in Egypt and there made social gaffes, who had had to come to terms with misogyny, religious fervour and a sweep of prejudices and superstitions. Not to mention polluted water supplies, rampant insect life, problematic food and climatic extremes. She saw herself regarded with increasing interest.

  ‘Right,’ Stella said. ‘Let’s have the first slide.’ The blazered teacher went into action. A brilliant square of tropical landscape sprang on to the screen, luxuriant growth amid which foraged a number of small pigs, observed by a tribesman wearing a loincloth. ‘Now what do
you see here?’

  Reflective rustling from the audience. Then the Quantock farming lady waded in. ‘Well… some sort of cross, I’d say. There’s a Tamworth look to them, but the boar’s much too lightly built. They’re like something from a rare breeds place. Not much meat on them.’

  ‘Is that sugar-cane they’re eating?’

  ‘What’s that gorgeous red flower?’

  ‘Surely the point is the chap,’ said the teacher. ‘Aren’t we meant to be thinking about him? What’s the stick-thing he’s holding?’

  ‘Stella,’ said Richard Faraday, with edgy restraint. ‘Do please enlighten us.’

  Stella explained that the pigs were indeed the focus of interest, and that these were indeed pigs, pigs somewhere in New Guinea, though she was afraid that she could not specify the breed. But these pigs were significant far beyond appearances. They were meat, and would indeed end up consumed, but to the New Guinea tribesman, they represented a form of wealth more crucial than mere food. The pigs represented a system of political checks and balances on the trotter, as it were. The pig herd would be built up over a period of years and, in due course, slaughtered at an extended ceremony of feasting and dancing which would serve to establish the strength of neighbouring groups and set up future alliances in tribal warfare. To their owners, the pigs are not mere pigs but the means to a further round of aggression and territorial expansion.

  ‘A new twist to the concept of the arms race,’ said Richard.

  There were questions about how the pigs were cooked, about tribal numbers, about weaponry. If her presentation was to be kept on track, Stella saw that she would have to curtail the discussion and forge ahead.

  ‘Were you there yourself? I mean, did you take the photo?’