A Natural Curiosity (17 page)

‘There’s absolutely no trace of her,’ says Clive. ‘She’s vanished off the face of the earth. Nobody seems to have any idea where she might have gone to. No living relatives apart from her sister, no friends.’

‘Maybe she’s run off with a man?’ suggests Edward.

Clive had not thought of this possibility, but it strikes him as implausible.

‘No, no,’ he says, ‘she’s not that kind of woman.’

‘How do you know what kind of woman she was? How does anybody know what kind of woman anybody is?’ asks Edward.

Edward laughs, not happily.

Clive is silent. His gaze wanders round his lounge and settles on the mantelpiece. There reposes a large white gilt-edged invitation card,
IAN AND FANNY KETTLE, AT HOME, HOUSEWARMING PARTY
. 7.30
ONWARDS
, it reads.

Clive’s wife Susie seems to have become quite friendly with Fanny Kettle.

‘Anyway,’ he says to his brother Edward, ‘if Janice does think of anything, any kind of clue, tell her to let me know.’

‘I’ve told you,’ repeated Edward irritably, ‘she hardly knew the woman.’

Everyone seems eager to disown Shirley Harper. Even her own daughter Celia, who has finally been traced, does not have any Suggestions as to her whereabouts, and appears peculiarly unmoved by the domestic tragedy that has struck her family. Shock, assumes the Dean of her Oxford college, who does not know her: shock, assumes uncle Steve, who does not know her very well. There seems little point in tearing Celia away from her studies, so she stays on in Oxford. Liz tries to get in touch with her on the phone, fails, is obliged to leave a message for Celia asking her to contact Liz if she needs to. Celia does not get in touch. The Warden of the college, an acquaintance of Liz’s, does, however, make contact: he rings Liz and expresses anxiety on his ward’s behalf and bumbles on about feeling himself to be
in loco parentis
. Liz thinks this is decent of the old boy, and somewhat surprising. At the end of his bumbling he mentions to Liz as though in passing that his own son has been going through a few little difficulties not unconnected with hard drugs, and could Liz possibly suggest the name of a sympathetic psychiatrist: Liz ceases to be surprised, and helpfully suggests names.

Shirley sits in a multi-storey car-park in Luton. She thinks of Cliff, slumped in the driver’s seat. He seems quite unreal to her. Much of her past life seems quite unreal to her. She walks round Luton, has a cup of tea in a department store, collects her car, and drives on, down the Ml, towards the south.

Alix Bowen is alarmed to receive an immediate reply to her letter to Paul Whitmore’s father. Yes, he will see her. Oh dear. Her heart sinks. This time I’ve gone too far, she says to herself. She had no desire whatsoever to see Paul’s father, to try to trace Paul’s mother. How has she got herself into this position? It is one thing to rummage around in Beaver’s past, amongst old school reports and old photographs and scraps of manuscript and dead bills, trying to create order out of paper. People are another matter. Live people. She should never have followed up Paul Whitmore. She should have let him rot in his box. She is not even being paid to visit him, as she was paid to teach English Literature to his final victim, Jilly Fox. Despite all her protests, she has ended up, effectively, as Paul Whitmore’s unpaid, untrained social worker. Is this wrong, is it immoral, is it prurient, is it foolish, will it end badly? She is an amateur, rushing in where angels might fear to tread. She wishes she dare consult Liz more openly. But she dares not. She is afraid Liz will tick her off, as she has done in the past, for taking on tasks for which she is not qualified.

And yet something in her knows that she is, despite all, doing the
right thing
. And maybe it will not be too bad? At least it will be ‘interesting’, she tells herself.

But this is only a justification. She is going to see Paul Whitmore’s father because she believes it is the
right thing
. The phrase repeats itself in her head, as she bends in Beaver’s attic over yet another box of holiday slides.
The right thing
. A watery little unobserved smile hovers on her lips. Ah, the poverty of moral language, the poverty of discourse, the thin vagueness of words. Instinct, intuition, utility. Here sits Alix Bowen, in her fifties, battling with these concepts afresh, as though she were a girl still, as though nothing had ever been settled and sorted. As though there were still everything to play for.

All things out of abstraction sail, mouths Alix to herself. Is it a line of a poem? All things out of abstraction sail, and all their swelling canvas wear.

Downstairs sits the poet Beaver, watching the racing on TV. Out of that old carcase had sprung images. Berries, oak apples, mistletoe, emmer wheat and einkorn barley. And rhetoric.

Does he, in his Indian summer, in his Lapland winter of rude health, recall his bronchial childhood, his mother’s fears of the pit? Alix nurses in her lap a letter from old Beaver’s mother. How has this letter survived? Has he cherished it? It is written to Howard Beaver in hospital, in Northam Children’s Isolation Hospital. It is dated 1912. ‘Dear Howard, I hope you are improving, I will be along as soon as they let me, I think of you night and day. Be a good boy. Your ever loving mother.’ What had it been? Influenza? Diphtheria? Scarlet fever? He had been a delicate child, little Howard, seventy-odd years ago, asthmatic, bronchial, chesty, like most children from the dirty industrial north. Infant mortality, child mortality, had been high here, in the early years of the century.

Despite herself, yet again, Alix weeps. She is a hopeless sentimentalist. It is that phrase, ‘your ever loving mother’, that has done the trick this time. Her heart turns to her sons, whom she loves beyond all words, beyond all rhetoric, beyond all images and all imagining. They no longer need her love. Her love is a smothering cushion to them. Nicholas in Sussex, landlord in his farmhouse, inheritor of lands, painter of increasingly large canvases, lover of Use Nemorova. Sam at his sixth form college, studying,biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics. She is their ever loving mother, but so what?

And, as a matter of fact, reflects Alix, drying her automatic tears, to tell the truth, she does not
really
think all that much about Nicholas, these days. She thinks far more frequently about Paul Whitmore. What does
that
mean?

Alix has become a detective, but Shirley has become a criminal. She is on the run.

She tries to remember tricks from the who-done-its she used to like in the old days, before she gave up reading. Faked suicides, bundles of clothes left on the beach, abandoned cars? It is too cold to fake a drowning. In March, nobody would commit suicide by drowning, not off the North Yorkshire coast. So Shirley decided, as she stared at the level grey sea at Robin Hood’s Bay, where once, on an outing with her friend June and her family, she had been happy.

At the back of her mind, she has a vague plan. She herself does not know what it is, but it is forming itself, in the obscurity. It has no shape, no features, it has merely a mood, a colouring, like a forgotten dream. It pulls her southwards, down the Ml, south, towards the south coast, with her passport in her pocket.

The solitude is intense. She has not spoken to anybody except shopkeepers and boarding-house owners since discovering Cliff. She feels an unperson. But something in her does not dislike this sensation.

She is nearing London. Roads beckon her in all directions. The North, the South, the East, the West. Blue motorway signs, with large white lettering. The big M. She is in a slight daze. She has not been eating much. Something called the London Orbital, the M25, announces itself. Indecisively, she joins it.

No Services on the Motorway, she is told. Places peel off: Potters Bar, the Dartford Tunnel, Sevenoaks, Gatwick, the South, Heathrow. She is travelling at a steady sixty, and seems unable either to slow down or to accelerate. Shall she go on for ever, round and round, until she runs out of petrol? Inertia appears to have her in its grip, the inertia of movement. Maybe she is hallucinating? She knows she should not be driving, that she is a danger to herself and others, but the mechanism offers no exit, and on she goes, round the full circuit of the one hundred and seventeen miles of the Orbital, on a conveyor belt, on a treadmill. She sees a sign to the North, to the Ml, beckoning her back to Cliff and the garage. She ignores it, and drives on. She passes flashing lights, a concertina of cars in the slow lane, roadworks. She recalls a news item of a woman her own age who had earlier this month driven the wrong way down the fast lane of the M4. She had ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Shirley’s eyes blur slightly, she resolves that she will leave the fated circle at the next exit, but for some reason does not. For some reason, for no reason, she is making her way back and on towards the Dartford Tunnel.

The Dartford Tunnel, which is new to Shirley, does not impress her. She had been expecting something grander, more modern. She is now making for the M2 and Dover. The word ‘Dover’ has written itself upon her mind. Kent and Canterbury, the Pilgrim’s Way.

A strange blue-green light is shining: she glimpses a vast landscape of cement-green-grey glittering water, quaking, ruffling, in a high invisible wind. Cooling towers, pit heads, industrial vistas, and then rural England, little stunted dwarfed orchards of apples and cherries, crabbed little trees, caravans, white soil, grey soil, polythene-glistening fields under plastic. The mini-garden of England. It looks poisoned, ashen, ruined by fertilizer, insecticide. The colours are glacial. The Ice Age, the last of England. A few flakes of snow fall from a clear sky.

She will have to stop soon, for petrol, for the lav, for coffee. The Little Chef, the Happy Eater, the Roadside Diner. Will she be
able
to stop? Her foot seems to be stuck to the accelerator, as in some Grimm fairy story. She must make an effort. She slows down. Little deceleration signs take her in, she is sucked into a car-park. She stops.

She sits for a moment at the wheel, shaking. She looks at herself in the driving mirror. Her cheeks are flatteringly pinked, deceptively normal, but beneath the rouge she looks and feels a very odd colour.

She staggers out of the car, stiff-kneed, into a raw wet wind. The service station appears not to be finished. Mounds of pitch lie around the edges of the car-park, bordered by slices of cracked tarmac, buckled in heaps. Hoardings implore her to Buy Her Ferry Ticket Now, or to indulge herself in Low Tar Cigarettes. It is bitterly cold. She staggers, bowed, clutching her coat round her, towards the building, pushes at the door, finds the Ladies’ Room. It is squalid, there is no lavatory paper, the dispenser soap smells of hospitals or prisons, and the water in the taps is so rationed that it is impossible to get one’s hands under the jet for long enough to rinse them. Shirley sprays herself with a little Anaïs Anaïs. She still has her creature comforts about her. She powders her nose. Then thinks she will buy herself a bite to eat.

The restaurant is surrounded by a waist-high moving conveyor belt, moving as relentlessly as the London Orbital, bearing dirty plates, cans, glasses, cups and saucers, discarded paper rubbish, smears of ketchup. She gazes at the menu, then at the food. It is disgusting. Glass compartments full of salads. Wilting lettuce leaves, dried-out mounds of cottage cheese, thin grey gelid ham, yellow-grey chicken. It is hard to tell which are the plaster models, which the Real Thing. Shirley shudders, moves to the hot foods, recoils from the heavy smell of grease, from the pots of gristle brew and dark gravy and wet cabbage, wanders back desperately to the salads, sickens, turns to the sandwiches, in despair takes a plate covered in cling-film, knowing it to be a mistake, but what else is there? She gets a pot of coffee, sits down, gazes round her.

The room is full of waifs, witches, grotesques. Shirley has never seen such a miserable collection of people, such a gallery of unfortunates. What has gone wrong? Is this some outing for the disadvantaged, the disabled? No, it is Britain, round about Budget Day, March 1987. Shirley is appalled. An immensely obese woman spoons scarlet jelly from a cardboard dish. Two thin tall lanky youths devour a mountain of chips and swill from cans of Coca-Cola. A young couple with a baby, pale like convicts, glare into space as the baby wails and wails. An old man on crutches picks uneaten chips and crusts from the dirty plates on the passing conveyor belt. A young red-haired scruffy Irish girl with a back pack is in loud dispute with a pale-faced, fat, crumple-suited member of the management: she is about to be thrown out. A grim-faced middle-aged couple is engaged in bitter marital discussion about the route ahead. A four-foot dwarf weaves her way bravely between the plastic tables carrying a tray loaded with highly coloured cakes. Is this the prosperous south, the land of the microchip? Everybody looks half dead, ill from the ill wind. Their faces are white, pink, grey, chapped, washed-out, ill nourished, unhealthy, sickly, sickening. Shirley takes a bite of one of her sandwiches. It is dry, grey, it tastes of nothing. Shirley does not know whether she feels sorry for these tramps, these refugees, these motorway wanderers, or whether she feels she has nothing to do with them at all. Is she still part of the human race? Is this the human race, or are these shadows, ghosts, lingering afterthoughts? This cannot be what is meant.

I am delirious, thinks Shirley. This is a dream, and these are apparitions. Perhaps, thinks Shirley, I died back there on the motorway. She takes a gulp of coffee. Surprisingly, it tastes of coffee.

The plump managerial lout is manhandling the pale Irish girl. He is pushing her towards the exit. She resists, but halfheartedly. Nobody pays any attention. She is not shouting. She is hardly even mumbling.

Shirley shudders, drinks her coffee, stares through the high glass window at the flow of traffic beneath. Wet flakes of snow swirl in the wind.

Up in north Staffordshire, the weather is better. If Alix had not been so dreading her appointment with Bill Whitmore, she would have been enjoying the drive. It is cross country, and Sam and Brian have worked out a route for her. It is open on the passenger’s seat: their nice clear writing and red arrows are reassuring. The heavy industry of South Yorkshire and the north Midlands gives way to that strange mix of town and country, that no-man’s-land which she thinks of as Lawrence landscape. And this in turn, as she reaches the land that lies just south of the Peak, becomes deeply rural, agricultural, Green England. The sun is shining brilliantly on scattered snow drifts, on green fields, on sparkling brooks, on mossy tree trunks, on a herd of muddy white prehistoric cattle, on the grey stone walls of a little ruin. She winds down the car window, and smells the fresh cold sap of spring.