The Witch Of Exmoor Part 3

David shrugs. 'Yes, I do. I've settled in here.' He smiles, a half appeal. 'And Gogo wouldn't like Georgetown. It's too b.l.o.o.d.y hot in Georgetown. She wouldn't last a week. She can't even take the Mediterranean.'

'And Benjamin is British,' says Daniel the tempter.

'Benjamin can choose for himself one day. I'll take him to see the place when he's older. I'll take him up-country, to the land of jungle and waterfall. To the land of ma.s.s suicide. I've never been up-country myself. And if he likes it, he can have it. I hope we're keeping the possibility open. Gogo and I.'

'Of course,' says Daniel the judicious, 'it's not as though Britain is the seat of empire that it once was. Most of the brain drain goes the other way now, to our ex-colonies. You must have been tempted yourself. As you yourself pointed out, they have more funding.'

'For people in my category, yes, they have more funding. But I don't want to be American. I don't want Benjie to become American. Would you want Simon and Emily to become American?'

'I haven't travelled as much as you,' says Daniel. 'And I've been lucky enough here. Nothing to complain of here.'

'The Americans', says David, 'believe in universal human nature. There's a heroism in that. But they believe that universal human nature is or shall be American. Except when they live in universities, when it suits their interest to think otherwise. Or to say they think otherwise. One can't always tell the difference.'

Daniel stops in his tracks for a moment, to stare at an intrusive rosette of plantain in the smooth temperate English green. Then he remarks, with seeming irrelevance, 'It's b.l.o.o.d.y hot in Singapore. And in Hong Kong.'

'Maybe it's Guyana's turn next,' says David. 'It must come one day. You know how Ralegh described Guyana? "A country that hath yet her maidenhead." Guyana for the next millennium. Meanwhile, I'll stay here and support the West Indies.'

Daniel, who does not follow the cricket, concedes a victory. Over the garden and the ridge the sun reaches its zenith. Patsy will be back from Meeting soon, her conscience, they suppose, appeased. A smell of slow-cooking beans and garlic and bacon wafts from the open kitchen window towards them. Beneath the pear tree a full-bosomed matron thrush pecks, jerkily, mechanically, at a worm cast, listening from time to time to sounds below the earth. David and Daniel descend three steps to the lower lawn, the sundial and the fishpond. A white lily opens its petals over the water and yellow irises stand in the marge. This is a temperate, a blessed clime, and with global warming may become yet more blessed, at the expense of less fortunate regions. Daniel has done well to remind his ambitious self and his ambitious brother-in-law that Britain is but a small country, although its population is some sixty or seventy times greater than that of Guyana. Its past has been greater than its future, which may or may not be true of Guyana. But its present holds them all. Daniel would keep it as it is, for he profits from its waning empire. David would change it. But he too profits.

They watch the surface of the pond, where pond skaters skim lighdy and rapidly over the meniscus in search of their drowning prey. 'Yes,' says Daniel, gazing around his own small kingdom with its ancient markers, as the shadow of time's finger moves towards noon. (His recently purchased genuine antique sundial has been set slightly off true by the man from the attic, and time in his garden is a little slower than time on his cheap, Taiwanese, battery-driven watch.) 'Yes,' says Daniel, 'it is very pleasant here, on a nice day like this.'

In Meeting, Patsy makes a perfunctory attempt to free her mind from its terrestrial anxieties, fails, and then settles down to them, methodically, as the silent minutes pa.s.s, as motes turn in the shafts of light that fall through the plain windows of this square familiar building. Two centuries of quiet settle around her, but her brain is full of noise. She worries about her mother in her expensive rest home, about Daniel's mother embattled on Exmoor. She worries about the next meeting of the Video Control and Surveillance Panel and animal abuse films, about the leak over the study window, and about Daniel's heavy workload and his inability to control it. Will Daniel have a heart attack, she wonders? She worries about the Partingtons' lunch in the Agawill it be cooking evenly? She worries about Simon's unhealthy pallor and his occasional outbursts of unprovoked aggression; will he be rude to Judge Partington? She suspects that the Partington daughter, Sally, has had a fling with Simon: had it ended in tears, and if so, who was to blame? But most of all, she worries about the man in the attic. Will he ever leave? She worries about him more than she would ever disclose. Her public line is confidence, but sometimes she admits to herself that she is, very slightly, afraid. Not of him, but of what he represents. She likes him, and he makes himself useful. But she fears his category. And he limits her control. He cannot be contained in her frame. She will have to get rid of him. It is an unpleasant necessity.

Meeting today is quiet, though towards the end of the hour, as Patsy twists and turns her pearl ring round and round her finger, secretly, beneath her handbag, old Arthur Clifford rises to his feet and says a few words about our friends in Eastern Europe, and quotes some lines from a Czech poet. He sits down again and silence resumes, until the two elders, Jane Farr and Ronnie Taylor, turn to one another and shake hands, in the spontaneous ritual of Friends. Gradually the gathering stirs back into life, little conversations break out, greetings are made, news exchanged. Patsy, emerging from the Meeting Room into the wax-scented well-polished outer porch, with its notices of jumble sales and WE A lectures and cultural events, pauses to speak to Sonia Barfoot, one of the more congenial and eccentric of the Meeting's members. Sonia has been in hospital again, and there is a soft, vulnerable, pained, washed look about her once plump, once pretty features. Her colourless hair is parted in the middle and drawn tightly back from her face and constrained by two tortoisesh.e.l.l pins. Her scalp shows pink. An expression of bewildered grief lingers in her pale grey slightly glazed eyes, wide open beneath their bald brows, their long colourless lashes. She is wearing a georgette blouse of lavender blue, a creased linen skirt of darker blue. Spinster's colours. Sonia Barfoot is back from the grave, where once she saw G.o.d.

'Patsy,' she says, making an effort to smile. 'How good to see you.' They clasp hands. She must be on drugs, thinks Patsy, there is something wrong with her eyes. Or has electricity once more crackled through her skull?

'You must come and see me soon,' says Patsy. 'Now you're better.'

'You're always so busy,' says Sonia Barfoot calmly, without reproach. 'And I'm not better. Not really.'

'Ring me,' says Patsy, squeezing the thin, blue-veined, old lady's hand. Sonia is not old, but she seems old. She has suffered too much and it has worn her out. Her suffering is not of the body, but of the mind. 'Ring me. I must dash. I've got to pick up the Partingtons. I want to speak to you about my prisoner. Keep well, Sonia.'

And she breaks away, and turns and waves, and walks briskly off to the car park, to health, to worldliness, to good food, to those un-Quakerly bottles of Bulgarian red. (Cheap wine at lunch, expensive at dinner, that is the Palmer rule, whoever the guests may be.) Judge Partington is nothing if not worldly. Indeed he is gross. He has to sit in the front seat of Patsy's doggy, muddy Datsun, squeezing his wife unceremoniously into the back. And all the way from his mill house by the water meadows to the Palmer homestead he entertains Patsy with tales of the Bar and the Bench. Partington is an opinionated, a controversial judge, and his face is flushed with rich living and low thinking. Today he is wearing his country geara bursting jacket over an open straining checked cotton s.h.i.+rt, and what looks like his gardening trousers. His wife Celia, in contrast, is provocatively well-groomed, and sports a soft navy and white spotted crepe silk dress.

He chatters on, as they bowl over the brow of the ridge, past the wind field, and descend towards the Old Farm. Patsy does not care for local anecdotes and does not listen very hard, though she gathers that there is some story about an injunction that Partington is longing to tell Daniel. Daniel, she thinks, will make a better audienceand indeed, there he is, waiting at the gate, as she b.u.mps over the cattle grid. She slips away, having disgorged her pa.s.sengers, to attend to the lunch.

Gogo and Rosemary have set the garden table on the veranda, and now they all gather, as introductions are made, as sherry and wine are poured. The younger children circle warily, hungrily, wanting crisps and Bombay Mix but not conversation. Simon and Emily know the Partingtons well, for Simon, as Patsy suspects, had once been involved with their daughter Sally, and Emily, in her riding phase, had shared a pony with her; now both Palmer children wish to forget both daughter and pony, but cannot utterly repudiate them, although Simon asks after Sally in a manner that could be construed as either embarra.s.sed or hostile. (Emily does not have to ask after the pony. It went to the knacker's yard some years ago.) There is another lunch guest, an idle rentier from over the hill who has been playing tennis with David and Daniel and Rosemary. Patsy had been rightBill Partington has a story to tell, and he wants them all to hear. He settles heavily into a garden chair, which trembles bravely under his weight, and embarks upon his tale.

'Late last night they delivered it,' he says. 'This video. Old People's Home, going out on Monday in the 6.30 doc.u.mentary slot on South-watch. The home wanted it stopped. More importantly the relatives. Gross invasion of privacy. False allegations. Indecent filming. So I told them to send it round to me. Celia and I saw it last night. Disgusting, wasn't it, Celia?'

'Fairly disgusting,' says his wife judiciously, as she sips her orange juice and casts covert glances at Daniel Palmer's handsome brother-in-law David D'Anger, who is listening to her husband's speech with unfeigned curiosity. Has she seen him somewhere before? Is he in television? Should she warn Bill to watch his big mouth?

'Bottles on potties, that's what it was,' says Partington, and laughs uproariously. 'Bottles on potties. Endless shots of bottles on potties. Wrinkled bottles, hairy bottles. And the contents of potties. You can't avoid s.h.i.+t these days. Medical programmes, wildlife programmes, archaeology, stand-up comicsit's all excrement. You wouldn't have got away with it in the old days. Talk about violence guidelines, it's guidelines on s.h.i.+t that we need these days. What, Patsy? Patsy agrees, don't you, Patsy?'

(But Patsy is indoors, carving the joints of the bacon, arranging the slices of pink meat and white fat on the meat dish, licking her fingers, picking out a clove, miles and miles away.) 'So what did you do?' asks Daniel politely. He enjoys Partington's performances and is glad that his career prospects do not oblige him to take them seriously.

'Oh, I slammed on the injunction,' says the merry judge, helping himself to a fistful of cashew nuts. 'Said it was in breach. Nothing but breaches, I told them. Can't do that to people. Can't show their b.u.ms without asking them. They're not all senile. And guess what? d.i.c.k Champer rings me up from the BBC. Direct from the BBC, to complain. Says it's outside my prerogative. Says he'll appeal. He was in a right stew. Fizzing and boiling. Spluttering and choking. Midnight, this was.'

'And the injunction holds?'

'Of course it holds,' says Partington, munching away, his teeth spattered with a white spew of chewed wet nut. 'I'll fix them. I was at Magdalen with Champer. I'll teach him about human dignity. d.i.c.k, I said, I challenge you, you show your bare b.u.m on TV, and we'll let it run. You do a b.u.m shot to introduce it, and I'll see what I can do for you. Fair's fair, I said. Do unto others. I've seen his b.u.m, and I can tell you it's not a pretty sight.'

'So what will happen?'

'We'll see on Monday,' says Bill Partington, grinning broadly and reaching out his paw for more nuts, but at that moment Patsy appears at a window, a cordless telephone in her hand, and calls, 'Bill! Bill! It's for you.'

He heaves himself up, stumps across the paving stones, leans across the flowerbed, grabs the phone. He yells into it. All of them hear every word. 'Eh? What? The I BA? The High Court? The Minister? What the f.u.c.k are you talking about, you a.r.s.ehole? Ah, come off it, you b.u.m. Fair's fair. You wait, lover boy. You wait. I've known Reggie since I was a boy. You'll get no change out of him. Eh? What?'

As his unseen interlocutor manages to arrest the flow, Bill paces expansively along the terrace, groaning loudly, and listening with pantomime impatience. He starts to tear at the ragged remains of what had once been a fair crop of brown curls. Then he breaks in again with, 'You swine! You b.u.m!'

Celia, her long brown legs neatly crossed at the ankles beneath her pretty soft hemline, rolls her eyes to the almost cloudless sky, and sighs in disa.s.sociation. Daniel smiles with undisguised delight. Nathan too is much pleased. Rosemary pretends to be reading a Sunday colour supplement, David buries his head in his hands, and Gogo rises to her feet and disappears into the house. Tennis guest Julian tries to start up a conversation with Daniel, but Daniel does not even notice: Julian is not bad at tennis but his views on anything other than opera are simply not worth listening to, and he wants to hear the end of Bill's tirade.

It comes abruptly, as the outraged dignitary yells a final oath of defiance, and presses the off b.u.t.ton. He slams the phone down on the inner window-ledge (thereby dislodging, though he does not notice this, a small vase of sweet peas). He returns to his chair, gleaming with the heat of battle, slumps down again, and says, 'Hope you enjoyed the cabaret!' Then he appears to fall into a sullen reverie, from which Daniel as host feels, after a moment or two, obliged to rescue him.

'Trouble, eh?' he suggests delicately. Bill Partington surfaces, blowing like a sea monster, and re-engages. He tries to explain the legal technicalities of the injunction, the legal technicalities with which d.i.c.k Champer seeks to thwart him, but the moment is past, and Daniel manages to divert him to other, less contumaceous matters.

Is it a form of retaliation that brings the demure Celia Partington to raise the subject of Frieda Haxby over the beans and bacon? She has read a piece somewhere during the last week or twoshe cannot remember where, was it in a magazine, the Spectator perhaps? about the fall-out from Frieda's VAT dispute. It seems that any victory she had claimed had been Pyrrhic, that new regulations were being drawn up to prevent further defences along the lines she had pursued. The grey area was being made light, to the taxman's advantage. 'Not always wise to challenge, is it?' suggests Celia. 'Even when one's morally in the right.'

None of them answers. Celia pursues.

'And is she still up on Exmoor? Has she any plans to return?' she innocently asks. 'Will you be visiting her this summer?'

Solidly the Palmers close ranks. Not a treacherous murmur escapes them. Frieda on Exmoor is as happy as can be, they all agree. Rosemary has been down to see her recently. The house is too large, but beautifully situated. Frieda is taking her time to do it up, but it will be splendid when it is finished. David and Gogo are off to see her next month. They're looking forward to it.

'We're hoping she'll invite us all for Christmas,' says Nathan wickedly. Rosemary sn.i.g.g.e.rs, Gogo looks severe, Daniel opens another bottle of Bulgarian, and Bill Partington belches, loudly, and pats his stained s.h.i.+rt front. The children have disappeared into the shrubbery. The man in the attic has come down to become the man in the garden shed. He too eats beans, shyly.

It is raining on Exmoor. Frieda Haxby Palmer sits in one of the many derelict rooms that look towards the sea, and listens to the rain on the roof. In better days this had been a garden room, where cream teas had been served. She cannot see the sea and the black rocks below, for rain obscures the steep combes. She can see only broken paving and the lawn and the abandoned flowerbeds and nettles and dodder and brambles. She has been out walking and now she dries her bare feet in front of a paraffin stove. (Rosemary had been right. It is wet here even in midsummer. It is almost always wet.) A wet dog dries by her side, and a pigeon sits at her feet in an upturned saucepan lid.

It is not a scene to comfort an anxious or a proud daughter. The room is full of junk. Suitcases, cardboard boxes, packing cases. Books and papers lie open on an old billiard table, on moth-eaten green-baize card-tables salvaged from the building's hotel life. On one, a game of clock patience is laid out, half played and abandoned. On a heavy mock-Jacobean sideboard stand three skulls, two animal (a badger and a sheep?) and one human. Their grim effect is softened by a cracked red Bristol gla.s.s vase holding a peac.o.c.k feather, a skeleton clock in a gla.s.s case, and a large alabaster egga nature morte, not a shrine or a cemetery. Paintings stand on the floor, their faces to the wall against the skirting board, their canvas backs and their labels of provenance exposed. Next to the alabaster egg lies a brown dried orange pierced at a shallow angle by a bone knitting needle. Now who would wish to torture an orange?

Frieda has been out walking this morning to Pollock Wood. She walks in all weathers. The dog, Bounce, has followed her. He is not her dog, but he goes where she goes. Old, black and white, shabby, disreputable, Bounce suits her well. Now he stinks and dries.

Beyond Turgot Common, on the upland, Frieda and Bounce had spotted a dying calf. It was lying in a ditch by a hedge. Its mother was standing near by, watching it and them without any expression of interest. The cow was big, brown, swollen. The calf was a pale dun pink, a naked skinny pink. It kept rearing and lifting its round ugly head from the sodden gra.s.s, then letting it slump down again, as though it were too heavy for its neck. Should she let the farmer now? She thought not. The farmer would not care. This much her hamburger researchthe research which had brought her to this ditchhad taught her. Farmers do not care. And she did not like the farmer. She did not like his thrumming generator, his barbed wire, his piles of old tyres, his heaps of slurry. Let the calf die in the wet. Bounc e had lowered his head, laid back his ears. Bounce put in no plea for the calf.

They had descended then, Frieda and Bounce, into Tippett's Wood, where they had seen a creature yet more dreadful than the calf. It was a sheep. Its matted pelt hung off it in lumps to trail upon the ground. Its wool was yellow-white, and it was stained with blotches of rusty red, the dirty dull red of dried menstrual blood. Its face was thin and shorn and quivering, its body shapeless beneath its ragged outgrowths. It gazed at the woman and the dog in misery. It was the sheep of affliction, the sheep of G.o.d. It gazed at them knowingly, then gazed away again. The dog whimpered with a slight fear. The woman stared back, recognizing it, recognizing herself. The scape sheep. It abandoned hope, and limped away, hobbling painfully slowly into the bracken, on its sodden footrot hoofbones. A rotten sheep, a subsidy sheep. The hillside rang with noisy water, and high overhead a yellow Wess.e.x rescue helicopter buzzed, on its way to search for lost travellers.

Frieda walked on through the ancient woodland. It spoke to her of decay, her own decay. The trees were encrusted with lichen, and small ferns sprouted from them, as orchids sprout from the trees of a tropical rain forest. Fungus grew from living holes and dying trunks and dead logs. Grey-white oyster outcrops cl.u.s.tered. Ash, birch, oak and thorn, the old trees of Northern Europe. Some leant from the steep slope at perilous angles, and others were uprooted, reaching their inverted crowns into the air like great matted discs of red ogre hair, of monstrous curling fibre. Twisted faces peered at her from severed, scarred and stunted limbs. She pa.s.sed the hollow tree, inside which stood a small lake on which a miniature elfin armada might sail. Scale was crazily distorted in this wracked and rent, this Rackham woodland. There was an overpowering smell of rich wet damp and decay. Stumps rose through the leafmould like old teeth. Frieda's tongue joggled her bridgework, and from beneath her loose bridge an acrid, bitter taste seeped into her mouth. It was the taste of death.

Then she had walked back to her fortress, the wet dog following, and now she sits there, amidst the spoils and bones of her history. She listens to the rain. It drums and drums, it ebbs then it strengthens, it gusts, it pours in heavy chains of water from the eves, it hangs in great drops on the salt-smeared window-pane. It pours and pours, but her eyes are dry. The sky weeps for her.

What is she doing here in her cavern? Well might her children wonder, well might the estate agent and the hamburger men have wondered. Chance had brought her but she has found a correspondence here, and here she has settled, to write her memoirs. Of course she is writing her memoirs. All her friends are writing their memoirs. At her age there is nothing much left to write, or so she might tell herself. (She is not as old as she pretends. She likes to meet disasters halfway, to get them over with.) She sits here, and addresses herself to her final questioning, her last revenge. This must be clear, she believes, even to her dim-witted family. She is here to summon her mother, her father, her sister, her husband from their graves and from their hiding places. As the Witch of Endor raised Samuel to terrify Saul, so she, the Witch of Exmoor, will raise Gladys Haxby, Ernest Haxby, Hilda Haxby, Andrew Palmer. Her nice clean ambitious well-educated offspring will be appalled by their hideous ancestry.

The problems with writing one's memoirs, she has discovered, include not only libel but also the unreliability of memory, the tedium of research. She has so little to go on. One of the vital sc.r.a.ps of evidence she herself burnt, long ago and, she suspects, criminally. There is not much doc.u.mentation of the Haxbys. One of the attractive aspects of Queen Christina's life had been the careful doc.u.mentation. Naturally Frieda had not really thought herself to be a reincarnation of Christina (nor in any way descended from herthe Haxbys came from Denmark, not Sweden, as any fool could work out, and anyway Christina was largely of German blood), but nevertheless she now thinks that her perverse and arbitrary obsession with this seventeenth-century monarch must have led her to this, her final quest. Well, she intends it to be her final quest. She is sick of everything and everyone, herself included, herself above all, and she can't see herself embarking on any new ventures after this. After this, she'll let others inherit the chaos.

Christina has given her a good run for her money, and Frieda had enjoyed her company. Frieda had followed Christina, from cauled and hairy birth through arrogant girlhood, through s.e.xual ambiguity and intellectual experiment, through free thinking and strategic conversions, through disguises and masquerades, to her old age in the Palazzo Riario in Rome. Frieda had followed her curious attachment to Descartes, which had in a manner killed him, and she had invented (evidence being lacking) a relations.h.i.+p with her French amba.s.sador Grotius, who had once escaped from prison in a box of books, and who died by s.h.i.+pwreck in her service. There had been much fun to be had with Christina in the colourful, swashbuckling, wide-gesturing seventeenth century, but her readers had not shared the fun, and had completely missed her subtle subtext on the theme of powerlessness and power. Not a single reviewer had even noted, let alone approved, her complex contrasting of the fates of Christina and her illiterate maid. Oh well, so what? 'I care for n.o.body, no, not I,' sang Frieda tunelessly to her dog Bounce, 'I care for n.o.body, no, not I, if n.o.body cares for me.' And the visit to Rome (legitimate research, all expenses offset against tax) had been most enjoyable. No wonder Christina had turned to Rome. It's a fine city.

Frieda had not been lying when she told the disc jockey, between tracks of UB40 and the Wreckers, that she had been moved to think herself in touch with Christina. Late at night, in the Mausoleum, she had had strange fancies. And here, on Exmoor, she has them too. Who is to say that one cannot put oneself in touch with an ancestral past? Her forebears had come across the North Sea from somewhere, as her mother had never tired of boasting, to settle in the flat lands.

Many times she had been to Sweden before Christina attracted her. She has had a long relations.h.i.+p with the country. Sweden had welcomed and honoured her. She had written of its iron workers in a study that had been much praised. And she had once, long ago, been in love with a Swede. They had sailed amongst the little islands together through one fine week of summer, and eaten crayfish on the sh.o.r.e. He had told her she was an honorary Swede, being possessed, as he was, by those famous national characteristics, selflove and love of solitude. He had also worn a das.h.i.+ng small moustache.

The doc.u.mentation of Christina's life had been picked over by generation after generation of scholars. Her iconographyChristina as Minerva, Christina ruling Parna.s.sus, Christina as Pallas of the Northhad provided food for dozens of art historians. Her relations.h.i.+p with the beautiful Belle Sparre, the tragic widow, her bedfellow and confidante, had been subjected to pages of a.n.a.lysis, and so had her feelings for the blond, handsome and moustached Magnus de la Gardie. Had she been in love with him, or with her successor, Charles Gustavus? Each letter, each seal, each tapestry, each painting in her collection, each binding of each book had been catalogued and examined through microscopes. Even her grave-clothes and her decomposed body had been exhumed and interrogated. The epaulets and b.u.t.tonholes, the embroidered cross, the silver mask, the deformed shoulder, the decomposed fibulae, the silk taffeta buskins and the grave-gloves.

Christina had been buried in a gown of white silk with a gold fringe. And the story went that in 1688, on the Christmas Eve before her death, Christina had tried on this new gown, watched by her last late love and protegee, the singer Angelica Giorgini. And an old wise woman who happened to be there at the same time, as wise women often are in such stories, said to her, 'Madame, you will be buried in that dress not long from now.' And so it had come to pa.s.s. Christina had died next spring.

Yes, Frieda Haxby had grown fond of Christina, who preferred flat men's shoes and short jackets to white silk, who loved the storm and feared the calm, yet who ended her days peacefully chewing chestnuts with the cook in her Roman kitchen. Occasionally, of a night, when the wind blows (and here it can blow) she fancies she hears the strains of Scarlatti and the clear pure voices of Angelica Giorgini and her sister Barbara, as they sing to the old queen amidst the scent of jasmine. Sehnsucht nach Sude, Sehnsucht nach Norde.

As it happens, Frieda Haxby can hear Scarlatti whenever she chooses. The Giorgini sisters and Christina are three centuries dead, but Frieda has Scarlatti on compact disc.

The mortal remains and doc.u.mentary leavings of Gladys and Ernie Haxby are, in contrast to those of Queen Christina, spa.r.s.e. Ernest Haxby had been cremated, with a minimum of ceremony; the indifferent functionary had, to Gladys's indignation, got Ernie's name wrong. He had gone to his long home under the name of Edward Haxby. And he hadn't been allowed the hymn he'd always wanted either: he'd often spoken in praise of 'We plough the fields and scatter', but Gladys and the functionary were agreed that this was a harvest hymn and unsuitable for a spring send-off. G.o.d alone knows what Gladys had done with Ernie's ashes, but Frieda herself had broadcast those of the mother in the small garden at Chapel Street, amongst the seeding cabbages. She had dug them in with a trowel and stamped on them with a Wellington boot. The cottage had been sold. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to write her memoirs in her birthplace, but Frieda had not been able to face such flat psychic hards.h.i.+p. She prefers it here, by the sea. But she has brought boxes of papers, and those she will, in her own good time, if she can bear it, examine.

Is this desire to write her memoirs a desire for revenge, or a desire to salvage her own self? She is not sure.

She remembers one of her last visits to her mother, in Dry Bendish. Herself a woman in her late fifties, her mother in her late seventies, in fair health but poor spirits. Ernie was long dead, dead of a series of strokes brought on by overwork: he had been the deferential farm labourer, cap in hand, put upon by all and sundry. Whereas Gladys, as she had frequently remarked, thought herself equal to the best in the land. 'Put upon by all and sundry', 'equal to the best in the land'. This had been the ditty, this the refrain, spun out remorselessly over the decades. Frieda stands there, in the small hot room that smells of hair, dust, mice and stale biscuits. Her mother talks and talks. Frieda, the tea-tray in her hand, the door ajar, is awash with tea. She is longing to go to the lavatory, her bladder is weak and grows weaker with age. This time Gladys defeats her. Frieda, standing listening to her mother, transfixed by the unceasing flow of complaints about a husband dead, neighbours disloyal, shopkeepers dishonest and life disappointing, finds that she has wet her knickers. Warm wet urine seeps through her black John Lewis elastic knickers and her black fifteen-denier cornershop tights. Urine runs down her thigh. Desperately Frieda tightens her pelvic muscles, arrests the stream. But her mother's flow continues. Gladys had boasted, still boasts, that her babies were dry by the age of one, but Frieda knows that this was a he. Frieda is not dry yet. A 5 5-year-old professional woman bullied into incontinence in a reversal of roles, in a perverse and s.a.d.i.s.tic seizure of power. Does her mother know what she has done? Does she know of this hidden humiliation? Please, Miss, please Miss Haxby, may I be excused?

Well, she had escaped from Dry Bendish to the sea's edge and this deluge. Will the rain never stop? It cannot, she thinks, pour down so heavily for much longer. All the waters of the western sky have gathered over the high wet land of the moor and have been sucked down to discharge themselves upon its black bosom and upon its upland bogs, upon its clefts and gullies. There is some movement in the darkness and it must lighten soon. Yet still the force of the downpour makes the great drops splash and break on the cracked paving. They rise again into little round fountains, some inches high.

She and her sister Hilda had called these special effects of deluge 'fairy fountains'. No, she corrects herself, not fairy fountains. 'Fairy crowns'. Little coronets of rain-pearls and rain-diamonds. Such an imagination, Hilda had had. That is what the adults used to say.

Can she nail Vampire Hilda, can she drive a stake through her undead greedy pulsing heart?

What can Frieda care for reputation? The last infirmity of n.o.ble minds. She is past all that, beyond, washed up. This at least even the utterly self-centred Rosemary must have observed. Why bother to set right the record for those one despises? Let them sink in their own mire. And sink they will, in the sucking mud of meatless burgers, drifting garbage, false coinage, hot vomit, corruption, greed, triviality. Scrambling for lottery tickets, selling one another bad dreams and ersatz merchandise and junk talk and fake labels. Sometimes Frieda thinks it is what they have done to the language itself that has driven her out of reach of her fellow countrymen and women. She had never considered herself a warrior in the battle for pure English, not wis.h.i.+ng to ally herself with the High Anglicans, old-fas.h.i.+oned novelists, Oxbridge pedants, failed publishers and sacked editors whom that cause seemed to attract, but of late her recoil from what she heard over the airwaves, what she read in the press, what she received through the post had become so violent that she had found herself moving towards their ranks. Better here alone than make common cause with such dubious friends. There are no common causes left. Each for herself alone.

In her last days at Romley she had listened to the sounds of the city, to the wailing and bleeping of grief and pain and crime, to the waves of the sky vibrating with jumbo and chopper, to the ground beneath her house rumbling with tube and tunnel and drill and screw. And from the radio had spewed words that no sane society could ever coin. Offwat, Offtel, Offsted, Offthis, Offthat. Everything had gone Off, like bad meat. How had these sounds globbed up from the pure well of language undefiled into the tongue that Shakespeare spoke? Even her local library now labels books as Goo and foo, as ROM and his and pap. Gristle, fat, chicken sc.r.a.ps and water from cows' heads. The Trading Standards chief in Taunton had told her that the chicken carca.s.ses are put in a huge metal container and pressurized until the tatters of flesh left on the bones begin to melt and flow. This excretion is squeezed through the machine's orifices, collected, reconst.i.tuted. This we devour, GOO, FEE, FI, FO, FUM. Our great post-war civilization.

Onceindeed, only yesterdaythis rotting world had fascinated her, and she had done her best to investigate it, to squeeze it till it flowed. But something has snapped in her. So here she sits, a queen in abdication, a queen in exile, a queen at the water's edge, an old woman with bad teeth and a weak bladder. They will not ask her back and she does not care. She has had her time. The wells are poisoned now. Even here, the poison seeps. It flows down the channel from the nuclear-power station, and the fishermen catch dogfish with two heads, mackerel that grow legs, lobsters that glow in the dark. Or so they say in the Wreckers' Arms.

She can see the far northern sh.o.r.e, for the air is clearing now. Across the channel in earlier centuries came Welsh coal for the lime kilns of this acid earth, and from the west came contraband from further afieldwines, lace, brandy, decorated steel blades from Toledo. The illegal trade continues, for today bales of marijuana are washed up on the beach. On fine days Frieda can see the pillar of smoke and the plume of flame and the giant's building blocks and towers of the steel-factory-turned-chemical-plant of Aberary. It rises like an enchanted palace. At night yellow lights bead the sh.o.r.e, and the single white eye of the sleepless lighthouse blinks. Freighters and tankers slowly pa.s.s. She watches them through her binoculars. She can see further now than when she was younger. She needs gla.s.ses to read, but her long vision improves. She does not always like what she sees.

She does not miss London. She does not miss company. She has had too much company. Her early years had been too thin and clear, too static, too flat, and to escape them she had thrown herself into turbulence, as soon as her children released herand somewhat sooner, in their view. Her middle age had been restless, it had whirled her from project to project, from continent to continent, from bed to bed. Now she wishes to be alone.

Her feet are warmer now. She looks at them with muted favour. She has an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of her right foot which has troubled her all her life. She can see that if she survives into an advanced old age it will become a problem. On her left leg she has a large scar, which she now examines with interest, for it occurs to her that it is one of the few visible messages preserved from her girlhood. It dates from the day that her sister Everhilda Haxby had tried to kill her. Although much faded, it is still prominent. For years she had entered it in her many paged, richly stamped pa.s.sports and in other doc.u.ments, under sections headed 'Special Features' or 'Distinguis.h.i.+ng Characteristics', until she had realized in the early 1980s that in these days of black boxes and instant incineration a scar, however historic and impressive, would not survive death. She had then taken to entering her dental bridgework. But not many countries ask for such details these days. We are all on computer, or expendable: who can tell which?

(On one of her academic jaunts abroad, in the 1960s, she had woken from heavy sleep to find her lover departed and her pa.s.sport lying on the hotel bedside table, defaced: he had added to the admitted distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of her thigh-scar, in indelible biro, the additional qualities of 'PARANOIA AND INTRANSIGENCE'.) The scar is important to Frieda. It will appear in her memoirs. It marks the day when Hilda Haxby had tried to kill her little sister Frieda in the old mill by the river.

Frieda now accepts this attempted murder as a fact. She would stand up for it in a court of law. She has forgotten that this interpretation of that long-long-ago incident is very recent. It had come upon her when she was in her forties, and then only at the prompting of an a.n.a.lyst. The a.n.a.lyst had not been a.n.a.lysing Frieda Haxby: they had met quite by chance at a private view of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Warming white wine in hand, crumbling puff pastry dusting their suit jackets, they had been speaking of sibling slaughter, a topic prompted by portraits of b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots. b.l.o.o.d.y Mary, her round cheeks girlish and smug, grimly and firmly clutches a rose and a pair of gloves; Lady Jane nervously fingers her own fingers; Scottish Mary rests her hand beneath her right breast above her rosary; and victorious Elizabeth Gloriana dazzles in many poses with ruff and fan and jewels and brocade. Rivalries, hatreds, treacheries gleam from their stiff bodices, their hard bold eyes. And as the a.n.a.lyst spoke of the murderous pa.s.sions engendered by heritage and court, it became clear to Frieda, in one of those flashes that come only once or twice in a lifetime, that the ladder had not shaken of its own accord. Hilda had tried to kill her, and all had followed on from that.

'What do you think, bird?' Frieda asks the pigeon. It rattles its saucepan lid in response, and c.o.c.ks its head at her with a look of pure questioning intelligence. She gazes at it with affection. Its red-rimmed eyes pierce, its iridescent blue-green bright breast feathers gleam. Like the dog, Bounce, it has adopted her. At first she tried to chase it away, following her London-dweller's instinctive dislike of this verminous and greedy species, but the bird had persisted, retreating from her waving arms only to advance yet again and again, until she let it into her house, to sit with her. She admires it, she is sorry she tried to reject it. It is slightly lame, and had flown in with a message on its leg. She does not think the message is for her, and does not know how to open the little capsule. Let it keep its message, the message can wait. Now she and the bird are friends. It is brighter than Bounce. It likes to sit in the saucepan lid. She does not know why. Perhaps it reminds it of something in its former life.

Her own former life lies around her in untidy profusion. She must make a thorough search, one of these days, for her parents' marriage certificate. She is sure she had seen it once, amidst the debris she had carried with her from the cottage after her mother's death. She had made only the most desultory attempt to trace her own ancestry through birth and death certificates at St Catherine's House on the Aldwych, for the atmosphere of the building had appalled herhad such places been as disagreeable as this in the old days, when she had worked at Somerset House herself, before she had been able to delegate such tedious work to research a.s.sistants? The smell of anoraks and damp jerseys, the slamming of heavy ledgers, the jostling and poking, the muttered consultations, the crush, the queues, the discomfort, the despair. Every twenty minutes the inevitability of theft had been ritually proclaimed. What could these poor wretches have that would be worth the stealing? Who would want their plastic bags and their stubby umbrellas? Their miserable plough-pus.h.i.+ng grandparents, their unmarried mothers?

The sight of her own name in the ledger had made her feel slightly sick. Born at 56 Chapel Street, Dry Bendish. Looking for her sister Everhilda and her mother Gladys had been more than she could face. She had chickened out and run away. She would write a record without records. Her last testament.

She will stick it out here. Maybe they will try to come and get her, those devoted children of hers, and carry her off in a straitjacket. Certify her, section her, lock her up and feed her by force. She must patrol her defences, when the rain clears.

Let us return to Hamps.h.i.+re, for it is still wet on Exmoor, and Frieda, although she has been an adventuress in her time, has become a bit of a bore. She does nothing but brood balefully on the past. She dreams too much, and takes her dreams too seriously. She is not good company. She makes little effort to entertain. Her mother and her sister are dead, but she will not let them rest in their graves. There is no reason why we should watch with her. We can take her in small doses. We will leave her by her paraffin stove amidst the paraphernalia of her necromantic arts, as the deluge gutters and dies, as she wonders whether to go down at low tide to hammer some radioactive mussels and winkles from the rocks of the sh.o.r.e for her evening meal. No wonder she is losing weight. But she likes mussels, and is happy to gleam, phosph.o.r.escent, into what is left of eternity.

We will go back to Hamps.h.i.+re, and see what has happened at the Old Farm. We will be more welcome there.

It is now the Sunday afternoon of that same long weekend, and the little cousins, Jessica, Jonathan and Benjamin, are upstairs, packing up the Game. They have been bleary-eyed all day, for they had played for four hours the night before; Benjamin had been on super-inventive form. It had been almost too exciting. When will they have a chance to play again? There has been some talk about a joint family holiday in a borrowed house in Italy in early September, but the children do not think it will come to anything. And anyway, the Game belongs here, in Emily's wardrobe. The children are accustomed to their parents pretending to make plans, then doing nothing about them. This summer, the Herzes are off for a week's cruise of the Aegean, leaving their children in Golders Green with their good grandmother; the D'Angers are too busy to get away; the Palmers will be staying in Hamps.h.i.+re through August. Their best bet for a reunion, the little cousins guess, is another crisis over Grandma Frieda. A second crisis would reconvene them.

They wrap the little riflemen and toy animals in soft cotton squares from Patsy's abandoned patchwork quilting, and lay them in their boxes, tenderly. They hope that something awful happens soon, to bring them all together again. Jon and Jess sense that if too much time pa.s.ses, Ben will outgrow the Game, and then they will never discover its meaning, its dreadful, its unimaginably thrilling climax.

David and Gogo also pack their weekend bags, and strip their pillowcases from their pillows. They are good guests. Rosemary and Nathan, as they pack more messily in the bedroom over the corridor, argue about whether it has been a good idea to delegate the next visit to Exmoor to David and Gogo. Will they drive down and purloin the family silver, the family secrets?

Rosemary has not recovered from her own sense of shock, and is hurt that the others do not take it seriously. It was partly for their sake that she had made the journey, now all they can do is mock.

Th ey gather downstairs, say their farewells. The Herzes are giving Simon Palmer a lift to London, and he climbs into the back of their car with Jon and Jess. Daniel has returned from driving the Partingtons home; Daniel follows the can along the gravel drive, across the cattle grid. He is taking Jemima for a walk. As he walks, in the summer evening, he thinks about cultural appropriation. The concept sets his teeth on edge. So does the notion of the Veil of Ignorance. It strikes him, as he walks, that David D'Anger is a shocking fraud. A hypocrite, a pretender. Hidden behind seven veils of academic obfuscation, cultural plausibility and good intentions. An intruder, a thief in the night. Daniel is slightly surprised to find himself thinking these intolerant thoughts. What can David tiave said to irritate him so much? He slows down, pauses, stands still, as the old spotty b.i.t.c.h squats by the path. Can there be any threat to him, in anything David D'Anger has; said? No, surely not.

And perhaps that is enough, for the moment, of domestic friction. Let us widen the circle. We need a new character. It is time to introduce the man from the attic, the man from the garden shed.

The man from the attic has emerged from hiding, and now he is sitting at the kitchen dining-table, sh.e.l.ling broad beans. Patsy is blanching and freezing them. There is a glut. He squeezes the pods, and takes out the plump, pale-green embryos from their silvery furred sheaths. He places them in a pudding bowl and drops the pods, already blackening, into a basket on the floor.

His name is Will Paine, and we have not met him before because he is shy. It is as simple as that. Patsy would include Will in family meals, she would happily (indeed with malicious pleasure) force him upon the attention of His Honour Judge Partington, but Will Paine is shy, and she respects his reluctance to be shown off. It is a pity that he would not meet David D'Anger, for David would surely have found him of sociological interest, but there you are: you can't control everything, even if you have the righteous confidence of a Patsy Palmer.

Patsy and Will Paine met in Winchester Gaol, where Will was serving a sentence for peddling gra.s.s to the middle cla.s.ses of Stoke Newington. Patsy had found out all about it, and had been shocked on his behalf. The sentence had seemed excessive for so small a crime, and very unlikely to do him or anyone any good at all. Will is not, Patsy maintains, the criminal type. He is a lost boy, looking for a good cause.

He is half-coloured. He says his father is a Jamaican, and Patsy a.s.sumes he is telling the truth. (He is.) He says he comes from Wolverhampton, and here he cannot be lying, for his accent bears witness to his honesty. His mother now works in Bilston, in a factory that makes cot mattresses. She had, when Will was a baby, worked as an office cleaner.

Will is thin, slightly framed, and pretty. His smile is hopeful, his long neck bare and tender. He wears an earring and his hair is close cropped, sitting neatly on his finely sculpted skull. His skin is palish brown, shades lighter than David D'Anger's: he could almost pa.s.s for white, were it not for something deliberately exotic in his manner, a cultivated elegance suggestive of the West Indies he has never visited. Frankly, to be blunt about it, he is too nice-looking to be pure-bred English. The pure-bred English are a motley, mottled, mongrel ugly breed, blotched with all the wrong pigments, with hair that does not do much for them at all. The English are clumsy and gross and at the same time runtish. They do not make the best of themselves. Their bodies are thick, their faces either pinched and beaky like mean birds or shapeless as potatoes. Will Paine is a beautiful hybrid, grafted on to old stock. Both his mother and his father are large (his father, now returned to Jamaica, an eighteen-stone bathroom-scale-crus.h.i.+ng das.h.i.+ng desperado, his mother sad and spreading from pie and chips and hot sweet tea). Will Paine is slender like an athlete, like a dancer. He is a mystic and he believes in vegetables and stars and cosmic correspondences. Even now he is explaining to Patsy Palmer the properties of the broad bean, which signifies, he a.s.sures her, prosperity in the sign of the water-carrier, good health to the liver, and nourishment for the left-hand side of the brain.

'You see the way they grow,' he says, showing her the little white spriglet at the bottom of the cleft of the swollen seam, 'they turn to the left, when they grow. They reach to the light, but the leaves always turn to the left.'

'Are you sure?' says Patsy, who does not believe in humouring the dotty, even when they happen to be ex-convicts under her own protection.

'No, not really,' says Will, smiling disarmingly. 'It's what I read in this book.' His smile is crooked, charming. His front teeth are both slightly chipped, evenly chipped, giving him a sharp, elfin look.

He recants so quickly that Patsy recants too. 'You may be right,' she said. 'I've forgotten all I ever knew about photosynthesis and the climbing habits of plants. We used to grow beans in jars with blotting paper. I don't suppose they do that kind of thing at school now. It's all computers now.' She sighs for innocence lost.

Will frowns, and continues to pod on. He is puzzled by Patsy, who seems to him to be a ma.s.s of contradictions. Here she is, like a good housewife, a good earth mother, freezing vegetables for the winter nights, vegetables which she has grown in her own garden and fed with her own compost. (She gets very little help, as far as he can see, from the aged once-a-week gardener.) Here she is sighing nostalgically about her innocent schooldays. And yet she lets her own children get away with murder. Will Paine wonders if Patsy has any idea of what Simon gets up to in his parents' absence? Will, who is now trying to go straight, would always have drawn the line at some of itasking for trouble, the road to h.e.l.l. Will has seen it all and he knows. Simon is a mad boy, a lost cause. Patsy does not even notice. And it's not only the drug scene. The stuff she lets them watch, those videos she has lying around all over the house. She must know what's in those nasty little black boxes, because she watches it herself. Doesn't it cross her mind that it might not be good for people to watch that kind of s.h.i.+t? Simon and Emily are her own children, and he supposes it's her business if she wants to let them deprave themselves, but he'd been shocked to see that she'd left it all lying around when those other little kids came for the weekend. Luckily they hadn't seemed interested, or he might have tried sneaking the worst of them out of their way, up to the attic. He couldn't sit through that junk himself. No way. It makes him feel faint. The sight of blood, the body parts, the meat.

He had been interested to learn that David D'Anger was, like himself, a vegetarian. He almost wishes he had plucked up courage and come down to say h.e.l.lo, instead of skulking up there with his tranny and his earplugs, instead of eavesdropping down the backstairs. He would have liked to have heard more of that conversation about the Veil of Ignorance. He had eavesdropped through most of David's exposition of John Rawls's Theory of Justice as Parlour Game, and had spent much of the night pondering its implications, wondering if he too, like Nathan, would give it a whirl and go for change. On the whole, he thinks not. He's been pretty lucky, most ways, and has a lot to lose. Being born in Wolverhampton in 1969 had been a cushy number compared with some. Look at those poor b.u.g.g.e.rs in Rwanda. Africa was a f.u.c.k-up, man. He couldn't credit some of" the rubbish he heard, from Afro-Brits, about their African roots. He could just about get his mind as far as Jamaica, and one day he'd go there, one day he'd go and see where he came from, but as for going all the way back again, back through history, back to Africa and the bush and the jungleno way. The buck's got to stop somewhere. Americans are barmy, Africa's full of murderous violent b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. You can see them on TV. Give me Wolverhampton, give me Stoke Newington.

But of course no one will give him either Wolverhampton or Stoke Newington. They won't give him anything. When Patsy Palmer chucks him out, as he knows she will, as he knows she must, he has nowhere in the wide world to go. He has nowhere and n.o.body. He bites his lip, throws the last fleshy integument on to its ripped and slaughtered fellows, and wipes his hands on his trousers. How has he come to this? How has he, a nice chap like him, ended up in such dire, such lost, such hopeless loneliness? He knows he is nice-looking, but he does not fancy the blokes that fancy him. s.e.x unnerves him, he cannot do it. He's frightened of the big boys, the big-time. He's willing to work, but what can he do, who will employ him? Will Patsy be able to help? Has she a plan for him? He looks at her, as she plunges the last batch of blanched beans into iced water, and tries to read her face. Can she be trusted? Does she know how to help, beyond this room, beyond this small daily task?

She catches him looking at her, returns from her own thoughts to him, smiles, says briskly, rather too loudly, as though to a public meeting, 'Well done, Will. You're an ace. Be an angel, take the sh.e.l.ls out to the compost for me, and the other compost bucket, while you're at it. Five pounds at least, I'd say, wouldn't you?'

No, she does not know how to help.

He picks up the basket and the bucket, and goes out through the back door, past the gumboots and walking sticks and dog dishes, and down the track to the vegetable garden. He wonders how he would make out if he had been born in Jamaica. If he had been born in this house. If he had been born in China. If he were to win the lottery. Would he still be himself, Will Paine?

He tips out the eggsh.e.l.ls, the beanpods, the burnt toast, the potato peelings, the wilted lettuce. The leavings of the feast. In America, he has heard say, they throw out more food a day than Africa consumes in a month. If you don't eat what's on the table in an American restaurant it gets trashed, even if it's still in its cellophane wrapper. That's what he's heard.

He doesn't want to live on leftovers for the rest of his life. He wishes he could push a b.u.t.ton and send the whole lot spinning round. Level the food mountains, let the wine lakes flow to the sea. He's heard tell of a computer game, where instead of killing monsters or rescuing maidens you could cause famines and gluts. You could play with the distribution of the earth's resources. You could make the desert blossom and parch the rain forest. What would happen, he wondered, if you spread everything thinly and absolutely evenly and gave everyone a bit of everything? Was that what Emily had been hinting at?

He shakes his head. He knows his brain does not work well. It is undeveloped, and he has messed it up with hash, for only when he is high does he feel less than utterly alone. People tell him his IQ is fine, but he knows better. In prison he had started an O-Level course or two, to fill in the time, but he knows he has no staying power. He bends like a reed. His mind bends. He is pliant, suppliant. These English, they are bred to hold on, like terriers. They hold on to their own interests even while they smile and offer shelter. Nothing will dislodge them.

He wonders if Patsy is right to put teabags in the compost. Are they biodegradable? He pokes the decaying mess with a garden fork, levels it, pats it down, conscientiously abstracts a cigarette b.u.t.t, which certainly should not be there, drops it in the blue plastic bucket called Lucy.