A Natural Curiosity (40 page)

Carla takes a lipstick from her bag, and draws a swastika on Liz’s gate. She walks off, a little unsteadily, thinks better of it, returns, loosens a piece of mortar from the wall, and hurls it at the window. She knows they cannot see her, but she sees their astonished faces, silenced for a moment, as they swing grotesquely, in unison, towards the crash. The window does not break, but it splinters. She has a small amount of triumph. But then, bizarrely, they start to laugh again, and after a moment Aaron flings open the door and calls, ‘Who’s there?’ His words echo into the dark street, He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Be like that, then,’ he calls, to nobody, and goes in and shuts the door.

Now the Headleands draw the curtains against the night, as Carla makes her way back to Kentish Town and the second half of the bottle.

It is Sunday in New Zealand, and as the Headleands draw the curtains in St John’s Wood, Stella Headleand walks along a bright morning beach of black sand. The wind is in her hair, the sea crashes, the gulls swoop above her, the air is cold, crisp, pure. It is early morning and late autumn in New Zealand. Stella is happy. She has got away. She has gone to the other side of the world. She could go no further. She is free. She walks along the beach, in baggy trousers, in shapeless sweatshirt, with her hair loose and her feet bare, shedding weight, shedding history, shedding family. A rocky island rides the horizon, an empty island. There is no one here but the birds, but behind her, in the little town perching in the valley, she has friends, friends who have never heard of Liz and Charles Headleand, and a job teaching small children who have never been to England, and who look towards the shining Pacific.

Late May 1987

Esther, Liz and Alix sit at a little table beneath a vine trellis. They tell one another stories, as they watch the little boats put out upon the lake. It is mid-afternoon, and the day is just beginning to revive from its noontide swoon. Esther, Liz and Alix have lunched well. They have devoured varying kinds of pasta, and little mixed fried fishes of the lake and a sublime Gorgonzola, and a salad of green grasses, and they have drunk a litre of Bardolino and a litre or two of fizzy water. The wine was undated, but the water had been bottled in June 1986, the first anniversary of Esther’s birthday picnic in Somerset, and the birth month of young Cornelia Headleand. They have commented on these not very near coincidences. Now they are sipping black coffee and deep-yellow Strega. The restaurant does not hurry them. There is no hurry here. They can sit here if they wish until night falls. They gaze across the mild dancing water, through a haze of midges, at a little island with a ruined tower, and at the far mountains with their snowy peaks. They are in a bowl of mountains. That evening, they have an appointment with Beaver’s mistress in Pallanza. She has invited them for a drink. Meanwhile, they talk and talk. They all have so much to say, they do not know who should speak first, so their stories intermingle, as they have done for the last two days of their little Italian holiday.

Liz has told Esther the extraordinary story of the appearance of Marcia Campbell, and has updated Alix on the extraordinary rapport which has sprung up between Shirley and Marcia.

‘I don’t know,’ says Liz, reverting to this theme, ‘it seems to me to be nothing short of miraculous, the way those two get on. Well, what’s really miraculous is the way Marcia gets on with
everybody
. She has this—this amazing
easiness
. She seems to find everything so easy. I don’t understand it. Her parents must have been a remarkable couple. Well, they were, she says so. And Shirley and I always found things so—so hard. You should meet this man Oliver. I love him. He’s perfect. Wherever did she find such a man? He’s the most laid-back man in the Western world. How can they both be so nice to
everybody
?’

‘She’s an actress, you say,’ says Esther.

‘But it’s not like that at
all
,’ says Liz, shaking her head slowly. ‘I mean, she does call people darling, and things like that. But that’s not the point. There’s more to it than that.’

Liz pauses, and watches a blue butterfly land upon the red check tablecloth.

‘She calls me Lizzie,’ says Liz, wonderingly.

She speaks of Joanna Hestercombe and her chestnut mare, and of Charles’s response to the Marcia story.

‘He tries to pretend he knew it all along, but if he did, why didn’t he tell me?’ says Liz.

‘And what does Charles make of Marcia?’ asks Alix.

‘Oh, he loves her, of course,’ says Liz. ‘He thinks she’s wonderful.’

And they discuss Charles, and his unfitness for the post he has of course accepted, and his abandoning of Carla Davis and her cause, and his new interest in playing the fatherly role. ‘He’s become positively patriarchal,’ says Liz, ‘it’s amazing, he’s always trying to organize little family evenings, he’s bought Alan a new car, he’s threatened to buy Aaron a piano, he takes Sally and her friend Jo to the theatre, he keeps on ringing Stella in New Zealand, he even came round to St John’s Wood the other evening with a bunch of flowers. He’s a changed man. He keeps talking about his responsibilities. He hasn’t mentioned satellites for weeks. I don’t know what’s got into him.’

‘Loneliness,’ said Esther. That’s what got into him. Loneliness in Baldai.’

The mention of loneliness brings them to Alix’s murderer. Alix believes that she had unknotted and unravelled the strands of her murderer, that she has seen into him and known him. She presents Liz and Esther with her version of the murderer, and they have, by and large, accepted it. Yes, they concede, Paul Whitmore has clearly been unhinged by maternal neglect, by maternal hatred, by punitive discrimination in his early years. An abused child. Liz does not like to point out that by Alix’s account, Paul’s father is a perfectly normal, indeed quite kind-hearted chap, and that many children grow up fairly normal without any parental kindness at all. At least they do not grow up into mass murderers. She does not raise this objection as Alix is pleased with her explanation, and anyway, Liz has no better explanation to offer. She does not claim to understand the pathology of Paul Whitmore. Like Alix, she tends not to believe in evil. So Alix’s version is as good as any, and it is certainly based on more information than anyone else has yet assembled about the poor Horror.

Alix has established, through more consultation with Paul’s father, that Paul had a twin sister who died in infancy.

‘I don’t know how I missed it,’ she repeats. There were the photos, on the mantelpiece. I can see them now, but I didn’t see them then. She died when she was eight months old. A cot death. No explanation, no reason.’

‘And Angela blamed Paul?’

‘So the old man says. He says she used to rant at him when he was a baby, saying he’d be better dead too, saying her life was over, saying she hated him for surviving. Paul can’t remember any of this. Or so he says. But he must have been affected. How could one not be affected?’

‘So,’ said Esther. ‘So, one feels sorry for Angela.’

‘Well, sort of,’ said Alix. She frowned. ‘But it is
oddf
isn’t it? she repeats. ‘That Paul should have turned out to fit so neatly the sort of explanation that I might be expected to find for him? Don’t you think it’s odd?’

‘Well, not really,’ said Esther. ‘I mean, he’s not just any old sort of murderer, he’s
your
murderer. If he’d been a different kind of murderer, you’d have lost interest in him long ago. You only persevered because you knew he was going to turn out to be the kind of person he turns out to be. If he’d been a—’ Esther gropes, desperately, for types alien to Alix’s broad sympathies, ‘a football hooligan murderer, or a racist murderer, or a City-scandal murderer, or a drug-pushing murderer, you mightn’t have stuck with him. Or, come to that, he with you. Not all murderers are interested in Druids and Roman History and botany, you know.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Alix. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She is deep in thought. ‘Actually he was a bit of a drug pusher,’ she says, in parenthesis. ‘He swears he never touched the stuff, but he used to carry it. He says it was a way of making friends and meeting people.’ She reverts to her main theme. ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’ she says, to Esther. ‘So, I haven’t proved anything. I’ve just confirmed my own prejudices about human nature. I’ve been travelling around a closed circuit. A closed system. Me and my murderer together. It wasn’t a theorem, it was a circuit.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ says Esther. ‘You’re the social scientist, not me.’

Alix looks at Liz. Liz is polishing her sunglasses on a corner of her rather crumpled linen skirt, but after a moment she returns Alix’s inquiring gaze.

‘Put it this way,’ says Liz. ‘If you hadn’t been on the same circuit, you wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere with him at all. You’d never have been able to meet him at all.’

‘That’s not very satisfactory,’ says Alix.

‘No,’ says Liz. ‘One wants a theory that fits all occasions. A new theorem. But there isn’t one. And look at the circularity of my own life. All the roads leading back to Marcia. Although I never even knew she was there.’

‘Life sets us unfair puzzles,’ says Alix. ‘Puzzles with pieces missing. How I used to hate jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces. One got so far, and then could never finish them. Or not properly. Not quite properly.’

A silence falls. A leaf drops from the vine.

‘And so,’ repeats Esther, ‘one feels sorry for Angela.’

‘I don’t feel guilty about Angela,’ said Alix. ‘Nor about the Doctor and the Colonel. It was time somebody got them. For something. And you should have seen those dogs. You should see our poor Bonzo.’

‘I never thought you’d ever have a dog, Alix,’ said Esther. ‘Let alone a bull mastiff.’

‘It’s a
revolting
dog,’ said Liz, severely.

‘No, he isn’t,’ said Alix, defensively. ‘He’s coming on quite nicely. He’s a very affectionate, intelligent dog. And anyway, Sam’s always wanted a dog.’

‘But not a bull mastiff,’ repeated Esther.

‘It can’t help being a bull mastiff,’ said Alix.

‘Why ever did you call it Bonzo?’ asked Esther.

‘I don’t know,’ said Alix, watching the butterfly settle on the back of Esther’s small brown cameo-ringed hand. ‘I don’t know. I think it was Brian’s idea. It was a joke that stuck. Brian
likes
the dog. Brian’s finished his novel, you know. I thought he’d never write another.’

Esther and Liz murmur congratulations. What will it be called, they ask. He hasn’t got a title yet, says Alix, suggestions would be welcome. He wants something to do with hope arising out of disaster. It’s a family chronicle of working-class life, a sort of celebration of tradition and change. It’s jolly good, says Alix, loyally, but I haven’t finished it yet. He says it ends in the year 2000, with a millenarian party on Houndsback Moor. And fireworks.

A waiter brings more coffee, and they spend a pleasant half hour inventing titles for Brian’s novel.
The Rainbow
, Esther rather unkindly suggests.
Bright Sparks
, says Liz.
The Crucible? The Roman Candle? The Catherine Wheel? The Bengal Light
? says Alix, obscurely, her mind running on the first small feeble firework of the post-war years, a modest little coloured flame braving the end of black-out, celebrating the Beveridge Report and the Welfare State. A little coloured unspectacular glow.

‘Catherine wheels never worked properly when we had them,’ says Liz. They always got stuck. All that money, fizzling away. Stuck. Charles would get in such a rage. I’ve never really cared for fireworks.’

‘Italian fireworks,’ says Esther, ‘are something else altogether. And very noisy too. Lots of bangs.’

‘In Celtic mythology,’ says Alix, ‘wheels were believed to be apotropaic. It says so in one of Beaver’s poems. I had to look the word up. Beaver used to do it on purpose. To obscure.’

‘Beaver was a barbarian,’ adds Alix, obscurely, thinking of Lucan, and the Roman legions, and Beaver’s stubborn selfexile from the soft south. She has not yet decided whether or not to edit Beaver’s letters. Her decision depends partly upon what she makes of the Queen of Novara, whom she will meet for the first time this evening. She is waiting for a sign, a portent. Liz and Esther do not know whether to encourage her to pursue the project or not. Would it be right for Alix to spend more years of her life with Beaver’s dusty old books and holiday slides, with footnotes and dictionaries, looking up words like ‘apotropaic’ and discovering that it means ‘warding off evil’, and worrying about what Beaver really did in Paris when he wasn’t working on a
transition!
They do not know, they cannot advise. Part of Alix would be engaged and satisfied by this task. But what of the other Alix? What of the stubborn mouse of Utah, gnawing patiently away at the tangled knots of injustice, preferment, inequality, aggression? And what of the Alix, who lives not in the past, but in the pale hour before dawn, dreaming of that great festival which she glimpses now but in shadowy images, that great festival to which all shall be invited, to which all shall come in celebration? Liz Headleand, Esther Breuer, Charles Headleand, Shirley Harper, Stephen Cox, Otto Werner, Perry Blinkhorn, Marcia Campbell, Fanny Kettle, Steve and Dora, Carla Davis, Dirk Davis, the Black Orchid, Paul Whitmore, Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and
all
? It is already too late for Cliff Harper and Howard Beaver, it may be too late for Dirk Davis, time is running out for others on this list, and Alix wants this party to take place in her lifetime, here on this earth. What help from the letters of the dead?

‘One would think,’ says Esther, watching their friend the butterfly, ‘that at our age things would be
clearer
. That life, if you like, would be even
more
circular than it is. That options would have diminished to nothingness. Instead of opening up. As they do. Odd, isn’t it, the way new prospects continue to offer themselves? One turns the corner, one climbs a little hill, and there is a whole new vista. Or a vista that seems to be new. How can this be?’

They gaze at the lake. Little boats with coloured sails skim lazily upon the water, a windsurfer tries the light breeze, a spluttering little orange chugger disturbs the peace. Esther raises her fresco-binoculars and watches them, then lifts her eyes up to the mountains. She focuses, stares, smiles. She hands the binoculars to Liz.