A Natural Curiosity (39 page)

Marcia has knitted her way through much of Shirley’s life story. Shirley finds it surprisingly easy to tell all to Marcia. Marcia has proved an invaluable ally, in this last difficult fortnight. She even accompanied Shirley (with Liz, of course) to Cliff’s inquest, and then to Cliff’s funeral which was very decent of her, in view of the fact that they’d only just met. She was very nice to Celia and to Barry, and even the censorious Celia seemed to approve of Marcia. (Marcia believes that Celia has known of her existence all along, but has kept her mouth shut. Celia is still water and runs deep.) Marcia has proved an excellent mediator with Robert Holland, who increasingly will not do, who is increasingly suspected of being a middle-aged bore and a philandering neurotic, but whose interest in Shirley has been much heightened by the Marcia factor. Marcia tacitly acknowledges that he will not do, while maintaining a perfectly friendly attitude towards his manoeuvres. It is all very amicable.

Marcia’s flat is in unfashionable Acton. It is small, and warm, and richly patterned. It is cosy. Its furniture is soft and rounded and mature, like its owner. It is full—too full, sighs Marcia—of mementoes and keepsakes—framed photographs, saucers from Harrogate and Hay-on-Wye, postcards from Venezuela and Korea and New Zealand and Mali, beads and trinkets and bobbles and souvenirs. People are always giving things and sending things to Marcia, and, as she is a good-natured woman, she does not like to part with these offerings. She seems to have friends in all walks of life—bus drivers, knighted Thespians, managers of old people’s homes, schoolteachers, antique dealers, shopkeepers, swimming-pool attendants. Her life is heterogeneous. A magpie life. It’s because my parents ran this boarding house, she explains to Shirley. All sorts came through. Mainly theatrical, but lots of others, people from all over the world. They all came to us, and once they’d found us, they kept on coming back. It was like a family.

Shirley is much taken with this diversity. There is room for her here too, in the corner of this settee.

Marcia shares her flat with a black man. He is her live-in lover. One day they may marry. Or they may not. His name is Oliver, and he works at Bush House, for the World Service of the BBC. He was born in Trinidad, he tells Shirley, but was educated in Britain, and has worked here for thirty years. He is a very good-looking man, with a wry smile and a small moustache. He and Marcia have been together for three years now, he tells Shirley. He is very pleased to meet Shirley, he says, as he too comes from a large and complicated family and has many legitimate and illegitimate siblings and half-siblings. They are scattered round the globe, although concentrated mainly in the West Indies and the Home Counties. Like Shirley, like Marcia, he discovered the identity of his own father late in life.

These mysteries seem natural to Marcia and Oliver. They do not seem fazed by them. They do not seem to think that the norm of suburban South Yorkshire is at all normal. It is only one of many patterns. They make all things seem possible. They are comfortingly unalarmed by the uncertainty of Shirley’s finances, by her muddles over the defunct business, the mortgaged house. They know people who are in
much
worse muddles than Shirley, people without a bean, without a penny, without a prospect, who manage to rub along all right, and come out the other side. Look, they have muddled through themselves, through terrible risks, ridiculous uncertainties! Consider the lilies, says Marcia, that was my Mum’s motto, when the milk ran out and the final notices came in. Consider the lilies.

Marcia knits, Oliver smokes a French cigarette, Shirley sits and watches and wonders. All three are half-listening to the Elgar cello concerto on Radio Three. The deep warm forgiving strains fill the small enormous room. The first tears rise to Shirley’s eyes.

Carla Davis cannot believe what she hears. Charles Headleand has betrayed her. He has agreed to accept the word of those murderous assassins, those crazed fanatics. He has issued a statement, on his return to England. He has spoken of conciliation and understanding. He has betrayed her in public. Carla is dark with rage. She will have her revenge. She has always hated Charles. She pours herself another large Scotch, and plots vengeance.

Susie Enderby and Blake Leith make love in Blake’s house, in Blake’s bed, in Blake’s bedroom overlooking the North Sea. High on the cliff, above a waste of grey water, they embrace and entwine and separate and converge. The waves dash white foam at the red cliff’s foot. They are mad for one another, they are possessed, they writhe and moan and cry out. They are in deadly, deadly earnest. They had not meant this, but it has happened, it has overtaken them, it is impersonal, it sweeps them along. They cry out, the seagulls cry, their serpentine limbs coil and uncoil. When the paroxysms are over for a moment, when they are able to seize a moment’s repose, they wander naked to the window, and gaze down at the raging water. Blake, his arm around Susie’s bruised and savaged shoulders, quotes:

For the foam flowers endure where the rose blossoms wither,

And men that love lightly may die: but we?

Susie shudders, quails. But there is no returning, for Susie and Blake Leith. On they must go, on and on, until they are let drop. And then what, then what? Ah, do not ask. How can there be an ending for this most unsuitable of couples?

Fanny Kettle, shopping in Waitrose, catches sight of Alix Bowen. Alix waves, merrily, and they converge, their trollies interlocking. ‘Hi,’ says Alix, ‘how are things?’ Fanny and Alix have become quite friendly, brought together by the death of Beaver. Fanny had attended the funeral, resplendent in mink, with a dashing black felt hat and black rosetted shoes, and seamed black stockings. Alix has decided Fanny is simply a harmless well-meaning eccentric.

‘I’m great, thanks,’ says Fanny. ‘Where did you find that asparagus? I didn’t see any.’

‘Oh, it’s back there somewhere,’ gestures Alix, vaguely, towards the rich international diversity of vegetables. ‘In the prepacked section, near the oyster mushrooms.’ (She is slightly embarrassed to be caught with extravagant asparagus amongst her purchases, and hopes Fanny’s eagle eyes have also noted the carrots, baby turnips and bumper packs of toilet tissue.)

‘I say,’ says Fanny, ‘what a terrible thing about that woman and the dogs, in the paper. Tony told me all about it. You
were
brave. I think it’s a scandal, only fining her £120. Will they close the place down?’

‘I think so,’ says Alix. She does not want to talk about it. She is sick of the whole thing. Revenge is not sweet after all. She has learned things about Angela Whitmore that she does not want to know. She has learned things about the Doctor and the Colonel that she does not want to know.

‘And Tony tells me you’re thinking of getting a dog yourselves?’

‘Oh, does he?’ says Alix. ‘We’ll see about that. Sam’s always wanted a dog, but I’m not sure I can face one.’

‘They are a terrible
tie
,’ says Fanny.

And on this platitude, they part, Fanny towards the asparagus, Alix towards the butter.

Paul Whitmore sits in his solitary cell. He has been rereading and rereading Alix’s letter. She has tried to explain him to himself, and he honours her attempt. She tells him that his mother is crazy. She alludes to the plight of the dogs. (Not all the dogs had been mistreated: some had been looked after with pride and care. Apparently this is a not unusual feature of cases of extreme abuse or neglect of animals.) She says his mother is in need of psychiatric treatment. She urges him not to think too much about his mother. She mentions the death of his twin sister.

Paul cannot remember his twin sister, however hard he tries. He can conjure up her photograph, framed on the mantelpiece, but he cannot remember her. He cannot recall that his mother ever spoke of her. So what has she got to do with it? Alix seems in some way to be blaming the death of the baby twin sister for the death of the dogs and the death of Jilly Fox. He cannot see the connection. He cannot follow the explanation. There seem to be too many explanations. Explanations recede and recede, down endless dark smelling corridors, down staircases and along walkways and round corners where victims lie in wait for him, up and on and down and round, round his confused brain and jumbled memory, walled in by grills and barbed wire and spiked barriers and iron gates, an endless prison of circularity.

Alix tells him that she will come to see him as soon as she gets back from Italy. Alix is a small light burning. She has not abandoned him. She forgives him. She loves him. His mother is mad and cannot forgive him and cannot love him, but Alix has been faithful to him. See, she signs herself, ‘Love, Alix’. Would she write so if she did not love him? No, she would not. Paul touches her letter tenderly, then refolds it and puts it in its envelope. He will cherish it.

He puts the letter away in his drawer, with his other sparse possessions, and returns to his self-appointed task. He has taken up botany. He has not abandoned the Celts and the Druids, but has been finding them confusing of late. Did his favourite people really inhabit, as a recent source has told him, ‘a world of gross meat-eaters, feasting round an open hearth, raising up whole limbs in both hands and biting off the meat’? A world of firedogs and roasting spits and great cauldrons and burning stewing flesh? He has turned to botany for comfort. He is drawing a cross-section of the stem of a woody plant. With care, he copies from the textbook. He is not allowed a real specimen. He is not allowed a razor blade for dissection. He labels the parts, in green fine-point pen, and then moves on to a cross-section of the globular capsule of a com poppy.

Paul had always been fascinated by cross-sections. To slice through the meeting place, the joining point, the node itself, through the conductor, the connector, the conveyor of current. Through the many coloured wiring of life. If one slices neatly across the current, with Occam’s razor, one will catch the mystery as it flows. This is a pure activity, clean, clinical, inquiring. Thus will he find the source of power.

Paul draws a circle. His method of drawing circles is curious. It is one he has used since primary school. He evolved it for himself. First of all, he draws a square, using a ruler, a lightly pencilled square. Then, within the square, he draws a circle. Then he rubs out the supporting framework. Thus he squares the circle. He has always thought this a good way of drawing circles. He draws, rubs, labels, perseveres. Like Alix, he perseveres. The poppy capsule is neatly divided, segmented into little compartments. Little pepper-pot compartments of oblivion. Botany is a pleasant pastime. Poppies are silk and scarlet, but this drawing is white and grey and flat.

It is Sunday in Northam, and Clive Enderby finds himself taking William and Victoria to the Hansborough Wildlife Park. Susie has vanished. He does not know where she is. She said she was going to see an old schoolfriend in Bradford, but he does not believe her. She does not expect him to believe her. When Susie and Clive look at one another these days, they stare, ashen, in disbelief. This is not possible, they silently agree, as they stagger on from terrible day to terrible day. They are nice people. This is not possible.

The wildlife park is a plot of derelict land, rescued from the demolition of the Pitts & Harley works. It is not Clive’s kind of place at all, but the children begged to be taken, they had been once with their primary school, they had liked it there. To Clive’s eye it is small, scruffy, shabby, overgrown with weeds. It is a mockery of his grandiose vision of green hills. Those who run it are grotesquely proud of it. A keen young woman in World War II landgirl’s dungarees points out features of interest and gives the children lists to tick. Sparrows, robins, starlings, magpies, kestrels, wrens, thrushes, mice, groundsel, dog’s mercury, rocket, common mouse-ear, dandelions . . . weeds, nothing but vermin and weeds. A wooden hut houses more charts, diagrams, botanical information and cardboard cups of tea. Clive is bored out of his mind. The young woman explains that small is beautiful, and talks about the lungs of the city, the small breathing spaces that a city needs.

Clive watches the eager faces of William and Victoria. No, perhaps he is not exactly bored. It is more that he is in torment. He would like to believe that this small rescued space means something. But he cannot believe. Nor can he believe that he will go home, alone, with these children, at Sunday lunch time, and try to assemble for them a fun meal of baked beans, sausages, tomatoes, toast.

William is asking the name of a small purple flower growing in the scrubby verge. He has begun to develop a stammer, over the last few weeks. Clive’s heart stands still whenever he hears it.

It is ground ivy, says the young woman. She shows him a picture in her book. William had guessed wrong from his chart, he had guessed self-heal. She explains the difference between the two plants, plants that look identical to Clive’s impatient eye. It is a little too early in the year, anyway, she says, for self-heal.

Can one make oneself interested in such small things? For the sake of the children, perhaps?

‘Now here,’ says the young woman, ‘is a real rarity.’ Clive follows her pointing finger, as she indicates something that to his eye looks very like common-or-garden chickweed. But no, she explains, if you look carefully, you can see that it is an unusual variety of wood chickweed, which has no right to be growing here at all. She offers the children the use of her botanical lens. Then she offers the lens to Clive, and he finds himself gazing at the quiet unassuming little plant with something that almost approaches curiosity.

It is Sunday in London. Carla Davis waits for dusk, which comes late at this time of year. She walks over from Kentish Town to St John’s Wood, muttering angrily to herself. There is Liz’s house, next to the clinic. Its small front garden is in full bloom. A white magnolia, a pink cherry, a flowering currant. The colour’s are deep in the early evening. The lights are on, the curtains have not been drawn, she can see in. She sits on the crumbling garden wall, and stares at them. There they are, the Headleands: Liz and Charles, Aaron and Alan, and one of the girls, she does not know which. Charles is holding an open atlas, and they are all laughing. She cannot hear what they are saying, but they are laughing and laughing. Charles points at the atlas, speaks, and they all shake their heads and laugh the more. Charles looks puzzled, amused, bewildered. They are teasing him, he is taking it well.