A Natural Curiosity (12 page)

He still believed he had that power. That he could step out of banishment, out of retirement, wave his wand and hold the stage.

She hopes those two boys make it.

She stares at the bowl of egg white. It is globby like mucus. A thin trail of unborn chicken lies in it, like a trace of nosebleed and snot.

Janice is menstruating. It is the third day. She has had an IUD fitted and her periods now are heavy, bloody, dark, rusty. She has to wear pads as well as tampons. She is afraid that she will mark her clothes. She is afraid that she may smell.

She starts to whip the egg whites, and they begin to transform themselves into something less revolting.

She wishes she had invited Alix Bowen. Alix Bowen’s murderer is a vegetarian. The red cabbage had split like a skull.

Janice shudders. Thinking about these things has made her feel quite ill. She knows she cannot afford to feel too ill. She has to carry on, for Edward’s sake, for the sake of the children.

She whips the egg whites until they froth and stiffen and peak. Some evil is oozing from her into them, through the metal beaters, through the plastic handle. Dangerously, furiously, she whips. The kitchen is a dangerous place. It is full of horrible animations, appalling suggestions. It is not a charnel house, no, no, Paul Whitmore is wrong there. It breeds, it incubates, it brings forth young.

Clive Enderby sat alone in his sitting-room in Hansborough, watching Liz Headleand on television. It was not the kind of programme he usually watched, but he found himself compelled to stay tuned. She interested him, and not only through the chance geographical connection, through the natural curiosity aroused by the sight of a Northam girl made good. Clive’s connection with her was more intimate. He did not know her well, but he knew more about her than many people did, and indeed he knows more about her than she knows, or can know, herself. To him, by chance, had come the delicate task of revealing to her the circumstances of her father’s suicide, of telling her how he had hanged himself, years ago, when she was a little girl, before Clive was born. They were connected.

Liz was taking part in a panel discussion on sex and the young. The other participants were a politician, a retired headmaster-turned-pundit, and a woman from some family-planning organization. One of the starting points of the discussion was the much publicized case of the suicide of a fifteen-year-old boy. The parents of his fourteen-year-old girlfriend had dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night and set the law on him. He had been accused of unlawful intercourse. He had thrown himself under a train. Everybody had piously deplored this outcome, but only Liz used the occasion to speak up for the abolition of the age of consent.

There she sat, dressed in a cream and yellow flowing robe, a handsome middle-aged matron, knowingly uttering atrocities. With a calm smile, and a mildly but not enthusiastically animated manner, and a battery of statistics. Her performance disturbed the live studio audience, the other panel members, and Clive Enderby. He listened, at first idly, then intently, to her immodest proposals.

Yes, she was in favour of abolishing the age of consent, she said. She couldn’t see the point of it. Sex had been progressively criminalized, she said, rattling off dates and acts and by-laws, invoking Home Office working parties, policy advisory committees, the National Council for One-Parent Families, the Criminal Law Revision Committee. What harm had that boy and his girlfriend been doing? They had been obeying nature’s law, not man’s. In other times, in other societies, they would have been committing no offence. The offence is man-made, said Liz Headleand, let us unmake it. That boy was hounded to his death by our inability to think clearly, said Liz Headleand, smiling like an oracle, like a sibyl, in her faintly Grecian garb.

Brave words, unfashionable, unwise words, in these days of AIDS-induced terror, in these days of mounting paranoia about child sex abuse and child sex abuse detection.

What you are recommending is a pederast’s charter, the keenfaced hornrim-spectacled young politician had protested, to loud applause. He appealed to parental rights and the sanctity of family life. Unmoved, Liz had said that she didn’t think it was desirable to use the law to settle family disputes, and that the boy and girl in question were both underage and had been sleeping together by mutual consent for several months. Now one was dead and the other was no doubt damaged for life. I don’t see what this case has to to do with pederasty, she said. Or with paedophilia. It’s more a Romeo and Juliet case, if you ask me.

‘But you can’t deny,’ said the politician, ‘that the removal of legal constraint would open the floodgates?’

Liz appeared amused, quizzical, interested.

‘You mean you think everyone is longing to have sex with the underaged, and that only the law prevents it?’ she asked.

The politician did not answer, but proceeded to cite instances of abused children, of sex offences against children, of prostituted children, of slaughtered children.

‘But I don’t think you’re being very logical,’ said Liz. ‘I’m not recommending that we decriminalize murder, or assault, or kidnapping, you know.’

Her air of patient detachment goaded and irritated the politician and the audience. The discussions rambled on from cliché to outrage to cliché. An elderly gentleman in the audience mentioned the decline of the Roman Empire. A woman in a lively pink blouse, with a curiously salacious manner, blamed sex education in schools for an increase in teenage pregnancies. Television talk, the pub talk of the public. Liz appeared to be genuinely interested by the oddity of some of the views expressed, and returned, perhaps unfortunately, to one of her original queries: ‘Do you really think,’ she inquired, innocently, this time of the retired headmaster, ‘that the desire of adults for sexual contact with children is so widespread and so strong that only the most severe social and legal sanctions can control it?’ While he hesitated, she pursued: ‘And if this is so, does it ever occur to you that this desire itself could be less abnormal than you believe it to be? And possibly less harmful?’

Now, Clive could tell, she really had gone too far, she had broken a taboo, she had said the unspeakable. The studio simmered and bubbled and spluttered. Nobody listened, as Liz expressed her sympathy with the headmaster, her appreciation of the onerous responsibility of his career, of his difficulties in controlling the staff, perpetually lusting illegally after the pupils, and the pupils, perpetually lusting illegally after one another. ‘It is a strange world you conjure up for us,’ said Liz, ‘a world which I find it hard to recognize from my own observations . . . ’

But nobody was listening. Liz was a witch, an unnatural monster. Liz smiled on, as they rounded upon her, one after another.

Clive Enderby, watching this curious performance, wondered: is she trying to commit professional suicide? Is that her
aim
? If she goes on like this she will be struck off. You can’t expect people to be rational about a topic like that.

Even the chairman seemed to think things had got out of hand, and tried to make one or two efforts to bring Liz back into the fold of orthodoxy. ‘But surely you don’t mean . . . surely you’re not trying to suggest . . . ’ he proffered, helpfully. But Liz persisted. Yes, she did mean, yes, she did want to suggest. Moreover, she said, she assumed she had been invited to take part in this discussion in order to make these suggestions, however much antagonism they might arouse, so she was hardly likely to back down now. When asked if her views represented those of her profession as a whole, Liz, for the first time, hesitated and then continued: ‘No, I wouldn’t say so, these views are my own. Some share them, some do not. But may I say that I haven’t really been expressing
views
. The rest of you have been doing that. I have been asking questions and making suggestions. And your response to those questions has been most illuminating.’

So, not professional suicide. But still, risky stuff. Unpopular, probably untenable. Clive, who knew next to nothing about psychoanalytic theory, was fascinated. As Liz vanished from the screen, he remembered her behaviour at the time of her mother’s death, when she and Shirley had been to visit him in Dilke Street. He remembered her mixture of curiosity and carelessness, of interest and indifference, as she confronted some of the squalid details of her own past. They were probably less squalid than she had feared, for she had greeted them almost with relief. ‘So
that’s
what it was all about,’ she had said, as though it was nothing—and yet how could it be nothing?

It came to Clive Enderby that what he had been watching on television that night was not a cool, objective, detached contribution to a debate, but an act of elaborate professional and personal self-justification, a baroque attempt on Liz’s part to justify her own genesis, her own history. And some of the facts, Clive suspected, she had misinterpreted. She was building on false premises.

Fascinating. I am out of my depth, thought Clive Enderby, and poured himself a whisky and soda, and switched over to the golf.

Liz’s extended family had watched her television performance in a different spirit from Clive Enderby’s, and with varying degrees of irritation or approval. Her eldest stepson Jonathan and his wife Xanthe, sitting before their pleasant log fire in their cottage in Suffolk, had not been amused.

‘Christ,’ Jonathan had groaned, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘someone should tell her the permissive society’s dead and buried, you just can’t
talk
like that these days, it’s embarrassing, it’s ridiculous, it’s so bloody old-fashioned, whatever can she be thinking of?’

‘Mmm?’ said Xanthe, who was not listening either to Liz or to Jonathan.

‘Any minute now,’ said Jonathan, ‘she’ll start singing the praises of the swinging sixties and going on about the moral backlash, I mean, you just can’t
say
that kind of thing these days, or not on this kind of programme—whatever got into her, to start appearing on telly like this? She never used to, in the old days, she always said it was a waste of time and a professional misjudgement, and my God how right she was!’

‘I think she looks rather good,’ said Xanthe. ‘Is that a Zoe Bittersweet dress, do you think?’

‘And at her age,’ repeated Jonathan, taking a disconsolate swig of claret.

‘Or it could be from Hannah’s in Baker Street,’ mused Xanthe, trying to pretend not to hear her baby daughter’s voice raising itself above the television’s ceaseless commentary.

Jonathan threw another log on the fire. ‘Please God, let her not start on infantile sexuality, not now,’ he implored, as the sparks flew upward.

Stepson Aaron was more indulgent, as his non-aligned attitude to life permitted him to be. He sat back in his battered old armchair in his flat above a junk shop in Chalk Farm and smiled in appreciation as the expressions of her co-panellists grew more outraged, more self-righteous, more disbelieving. The crosser they got, he noted, the more serenely Liz smiled. ‘That’s the spirit, Liz,’ he said, aloud, approvingly, to his empty room. He would ring her, in the morning, to congratulate her upon her stand.

Stepson Alan up in Manchester missed the programme altogether. He never knew it was on, and was never to know: oblique references to it continued to bewilder him for some weeks. Alan watched quite a lot of television, but being a true intellectual his favourite programmes were soccer, snooker, a cartoon about subversive mice and a sit-com about the rag trade. He hated chats and debates on the box. He did enough chatting and debating, with his students and his friends.

Daughter Sally watched, loyally, with her friend Jo in their flat in Streatham. They were both slightly bored by it, but did not say so. They were eating a Chinese takeaway as they watched. Their minds were not on Liz and her arguments. Their minds were on other things. They were both well over the age of consent.

Daughter Stella watched, and was perturbed. Like Jonathan, she had had enough of her parents making fools of themselves, but unlike Jonathan she had also had enough of England. Watching the extraordinary mixture of whining vote-beseeching, arse-licking vulgarity, demotic stupidity, intellectual pretension, moral confusion and entertainment-packaged pseudo-seriousness, she groaned within her twelve stones of self-dislike, disliking Liz and her live studio audience even more than she disliked herself. But in some way, deep down, she felt the stirrings of hope. The dislike was about to come to a head, to burst, and she would be purged, free again, light as air again, she would take off, for another continent, another world.

Ex-husband Charles, watching alone in Kentish Town, was also perturbed—not so much by what Liz said, which was old hat to him, as by the fact that she was there on TV saying it at all. Her disrespect for his medium had been so consistent, so sustained. Why had it now crumbled? What weakness in her was showing itself in this belated consent? Did she need attention, notoriety? Surely not. She was diminished by her concession. The medium had been too powerful for her, it had sucked her up and into its great dusty bag full of rubbish. Charles loathed discussion programmes. He liked Hard News.

Carla Davis watched Liz Headleand’s programme with a mixture of rage and satisfaction. Like Charles, Carla Davis is a news addict. She was addicted long before Dirk’s disappearance, although that had condoned and intensified her passion. As a bored homeworker (she worked as a freelance editor, usually on dullish reference books) she had often switched on the news in hope of a catastrophe to divert her from the tedium of her task. Sometimes she was rewarded by a plane crash or a Beirut bomb or a hijacking, but not often enough. As she listened to the same round of repeated or minimally updated reports of union negotiations, of President Reagan’s operations and ill health, of assessments of the prospects of the Tory Party at the next election, she had often had a wild desire for a completely different lot of news. Completely and utterly different. She sometimes fantasized about a day which would begin normally enough, with a dullish selection of items on the
Today
programme on Radio 4 at 7.30 a.m., items which would reappear in identical or slightly updated form throughout the morning until the noon news, but which would vanish utterly from
The World at One
. The nation would switch on
The World at One
, and find a completely NEW LOT of news! Ten new items. All wholly new. A New World, with New News, New Made. Change history. Begin again, at lunch time.