A Natural Curiosity (5 page)

Charles plots to go to Baldai to track down Dirk Davis. Carla eggs him on. Liz is neutral. Jonathan and Alan are concerned, because they are the responsible members of the family. Aaron, the irresponsible son, rather admires his father’s late recklessness. Sally and Stella, the youngest, daughters of both Charles and Liz, do not know what to think. They have their own problems, both of them, and anyway nobody cares what they think. So why bother to think anything? This is Sally’s line. She is not interested in the ridiculous male world of plots and bombs and fanatics and hostages and warfare. She fights on another battlefront, and belongs to another plot, another story.

Stella weighs twelve stones, hates university, is very unhappy, does not get on with either Liz or Charles, and with some justification thinks herself neglected, the neglected runt of the family. She will be neglected by this narrative too, for thus is the injustice of life compounded. But it has to be said that none of the Headleand children will get much of an appearance here. They will serve only as occasional chorus. There are too many of them to be treated individually. And anyway, Charles himself is only a small subplot. This is not the Headleand saga. You do not have to retain these names, these relationships.

But nevertheless, Liz rocks her step-granddaughter Cornelia in her arms, as she sits in the cane-backed rocking chair in which she nursed her own babies. Alan and Jonathan plot against their father’s plots. The eagle clock ticks on the mantelshelf. Liz thinks Dirk Davis is a heap of crumbling bones.

It is a Friday lunch time in late January, and Tony Kettle and Sam Bowen are taking a short-cut through the Botanical Gardens. They are on their way to a talk at the old grammar school. They both attend a sixth form college downtown, and have struck up a friendship, as they are both new boys in Northam: Tony is newer here than Sam, but he has not travelled so far. Sam is from London, from Wandsworth, and spent his early years of secondary education in a mixed, noisy neighbourhood comprehensive. Tony Kettle spent those years in a quiet dull old-fashioned school in a small market town in the flat wastes near the Humber.

Tony and Sam have compared notes, over the past three months. On Northam, on the sixth form college, on their own past experiences of school, and, very circumspectly, very indirectly, on their parents and on the factors that have brought their parents to Northam.

They are talking, now, about racism, prompted by an incident reported at school that morning by Ramesh Bannerjee. Ramesh claimed that a pair of pig’s trotters had been suspended from his next-door neighbour’s front door knob, and an abusive message had been scribbled on the door, paki swine, it had declared, in yellow aerosol. Tony and Sam are not sure whether to believe this story. Ramesh seemed to enjoy relating it so much that his relish made them suspicious. They like Ramesh, and respect him as an advocate for his cause, but sometimes think he goes too far. ‘I mean, in Brixton we heard a lot of stories,’ said Sam, ‘but you wouldn’t think, on the Hilldrop Estate, would you?’

‘It’ll be a pig’s head next,’ said Tony.

‘There
was
a case of a pig’s head, in Bromley,’ said Sam. ‘Nailed to the gatepost.’

‘And what about that kid in Manchester?’ asked Tony.

They walk on, in silence, for a while. The papers that week had been full of reports of a thirteen-year-old schoolboy, knifed to death in a school playground, amidst racial taunts.

Tony Kettle remembers the street life of the little town of Ogham. Dull, dull, dull. Faded pink-tinted advertisements of out-of-date fashions piled haphazardly in the window of a small shop selling knitting wool. An estate agent, a grocer, a newsagent, a video library. The old medieval market cross and the little bridge, where a bored sullen knot of teenagers would gather of a summer evening, in the empty rural wastes. Boredom. God, Tony Kettle knew what it was to be bored. Boredom could drive you out of your mind, could make a knife in the chest seem a soft option.

He kicks a stone.

Things are worse in Manchester,’ volunteers Sam. ‘More blacks. There’s a very small black population in Northam. Comparatively.’

Sam knows this because he often hears his parents discuss these matters. The Kettle parents do not discuss them. Tony expresses scepticism. There seem to be a hell of a lot of blacks in Northam, Tony says, not that he has anything against them, but there are, I mean, even in. the sixth form college there are a few, and that’s not even a proper sample. Sam expresses scorn, worldly wisdom, implies that Kettle, from the sticks, doesn’t know a thing. He describes, luridly, some of the goings-on at his old school in Wandsworth. ‘You’re from the backwater, the backwood,’ says Sam. Tony Kettle nods as they skirt the overgrown ancient bear pit, where once captive bears paced back and forth, back and forth, for the entertainment of the citizens of Northam. It still has a hint of the Colosseum, a dangerous whiff of barbarity. ‘Yes,’ says Tony, ‘there wasn’t much going on in Ogham.’

They emerge into the well-kept stretch of gardens, the landscaped areas, leaving the back path and the bear pit. Under the vast swollen bole of a large labelled rare tree, a fine specimen of tulip tree,
Liriodendron tulipifera
, cluster many brave little clumps of snowdrops, raising their heads, their green leaves, from the pale cold tender yellow-green grass of January. Their little white heads assemble. A promise of spring. Tony Kettle and Sam Bowen pay them no attention at all. They do not even see them. They are too old and too young to see trees and snowdrops. Tony Kettle kicks another stone.

Alix Bowen has picked a little wineglass full of snowdrops from her own back garden and placed them on her desk. They cheer her, they comfort her. Alix Bowen believes that her son Sam Bowen is at heart a country boy, a snowdrop lover, a pond examiner, a springer spaniel enthusiast. This is her image of him. She would be surprised to learn that he is no longer much interested in springer spaniels or botany, and that something in him hankers after the violent delights of Wandsworth.

Sam and Tony are on their way to listen to an address from a visiting dignitary of the Wildlife in Britain Fund.

The dignitary, when he arrives upon the platform, is not very dignified. He is one of the new-style campaigners, a jolly young bearded forty-year-old with an indeterminate accent and a stock of quips. He speaks of the destruction of the countryside, of the Green Belt, of the threat to the landscape from Britain’s agricultural policy and the EEC. He gives a little history, he shows slides. He conveys a lot of information, but he conveys it so informally, so chattily, that many of his listeners are not aware that it is being conveyed at all. Old Mr Spriggs, Geography teacher of the old style, on the verge of retirement, listens with mingled admiration and irritation. Is this the way to do it, then? Jokes, a little bad language to season the discourse, a lot of amiable smiling and a big Guernsey sweater? Mr Spriggs does not know. He is glad he is leaving the battlefield of educational ideology. He has had enough. Will any of this bright and breezy talk stick? Mr Spriggs doubts it.

The bearded dignitary concludes. It is up to them, the next generation, to cherish the heritage of Britain. He announces the plans for the nationwide Wildlife Competition he is here to launch. The prize money is generous, the judges are glamorous. ‘We really want
your
ideas,’ he assures the audience.
‘You
can
help
us.’ He beams sincerity and
bonhomie
. He does not solicit questions, as he is running out of time and has to be in Leeds by six for another meeting. He leaps down from the platform with conspicuous agility, and, as he departs, distributes free ballpoint pens and little badges bearing symbols of badgers and birds and buttercups, along with copies of the competition leaflet.

He does not distribute them very democratically, as he has not enough to go around, but nevertheless Tony Kettle manages to acquire a ballpoint.

When that evening Tony, in the middle of his supper of sausages and baked beans, tries to take down a telephone message for his often-absent, much-telephoned mother, he finds his Wildlife Pen does not work. He presses hard, trying to indent the paper deeply enough to be able to read it by impress alone, but the name and number he has been asked to convey to Fanny Kettle never reach their destination. Fanny Kettle never rings back. One of her many ghostly victim-admirers will wait for ever in vain, reprieved by chance from the lethal attentions of Fanny Kettle.

‘My God,’ says Carla Davis, opening the front door to Charles Headleand in Kentish Town, ‘whatever has happened to you?’

Charles stands there, his face covered with elastoplast. Strips cover his forehead, his nose. His eyes stare out as from a visor.

‘I was mugged,’ says Charles. Morosely, grudgingly. He is not best pleased, one can tell.

Carla, I am sorry to say, laughs. Mysteriously, this response brings a smile to what is left of Charles’s features.

‘Come in, come in,’ she says, although she is in fact blocking his entry, as he stands there in the narrow London hallway. He pushes past her, hangs his coat on the row of hooks, amidst an untidy array of raincoats, scarves, cardigans, anoraks, overcoats, plastic bags.

In the dark drawing-room, she inspects him more closely. What one can see of his face is yellow-blue with bruising.

She pours him a stiff Scotch, adds a splash of water, without asking him what he wants.

Charles explains that he was mugged while jogging in Regent’s Park. This makes Carla laugh some more. She has always been amused by Charles’s jogging habits. ‘Who
wants
to live longer?’ asks Carla, self-destructive Carla, rhetorically, from time to time.

Nevertheless, she listens with interest as Charles explains the detail of his encounter with the two muggers, at six on the preceding evening, interrupting only to wonder why anyone should want to mug a jogger who clearly hadn’t got thousands of pounds of cash stashed in his track suit pocket.

‘It was just by the rose garden, on the Inner Circle. Outside Regent’s College,’ said Charles, as though this somehow made matters worse.

He had been hit across the face by a heavy object—a metal bar, a wooden club, he hadn’t been able to tell which. Fortunately he hadn’t fallen, had been able to stagger on, then had run towards Regent’s College, streaming blood, and had crashed wildly in as though for sanctuary. The porter had been alarmed by his apparition and so had Charles’s old friend Melvyn Stacey, who was just on his way in to give a lecture on the Thai—Kampuchean border on behalf of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Assembled agency do-gooders and governmental procrastinators had had to wait for their address while Melvyn listened to Charles’s outpourings of rage against thugs and vandals, while Melvyn dabbed at the spatters of Charles’s blood that had somehow communicated themselves to Melvyn’s best grey lecture suit, while Melvyn convinced Charles that he couldn’t possibly drive himself home but would have to go to St Andrew’s casualty department in an ambulance.

‘And when I got back from the hospital,’ said Charles to Carla, ‘they’d locked the gates, and I had to leave the car in the college car park overnight, and as I don’t have a permit they had the cheek to fine me £15 for unauthorized parking. Bloody inhuman, if you ask me, and now they’ll be on the look-out for me whenever I use the park again.’

‘That’ll teach you to go jogging.’ said Carla, sipping her Scotch.

‘If I hadn’t been a jogger, I’d never have been fit enough to run away. I might have been dead in the gutter by the rose garden,’ said Charles.

‘If you hadn’t been a jogger, you wouldn’t have been mugged in the first place,’ said Carla.

His nose had been broken and pushed sideways across his face. Would it go back to where it had come from, Carla wanted to know? God alone knows, said Charles, who was cheering up under the stimulating influence of Carla and Scotch.

He did not divulge to Carla his mixed feelings about Regent’s Park, which had somehow broken out in this broken nose. Once he had lived a short walk from Regent’s Park, with his second wife Liz Headleand: once he had lived in a grand eighteenth-century house in Harley Street: once he had been able to take a turn beneath the red horse-chestnuts while the potatoes boiled. Now, thanks to the legitimate claims on his estate of his second wife, the extravagance of his third wife, the demands of his five offspring, and the insolvency of his business, he was obliged to live in a flat in Kentish Town, drive his car to Regent’s Park to jog, and park illicitly in the grounds of Regent’s College. Regent’s Park represents all that is gracious in London living, all that Charles had lost, all that need never have been forfeited had he lived more prudently. Outer circle, inner circle, little bridges, roses, ducks, tennis courts, avenues of trees, urns with wallflowers, pink blossom in spring. Charles is not much interested in flowers, but he has, partly through Liz’s influence, become accustomed to them, both indoors and out. His own flat, where he lives alone, is flowerless. Sometimes he buys himself a bunch of daffodils and shoves them in a jug, but they never look convincing.

Carla has dried flowers. Honesty, sea lavender, all a little dusty. She rarely indulges in the freshly cut variety.

However, Charles continues, some good has come out of his misfortune. This unexpected, bloodstained renewal of acquaintance with Melvyn Stacey may bear fruit. Melvyn had rung Charles that morning at nine, to ask after his nose, and Charles had managed to engage his interest in the plight of Dirk Davis, languishing forgotten in Baldai. The International Red Cross was one of the only channels through which one could get a visa to Baldai these days. Journalists were unwelcome in Baldai. Charles had raised the subject at once, in what seemed uniquely favourable circumstances, and he and Melvyn were to meet for lunch the following week.

‘Well done,’ said Carla. Her large eyes swim with pain, with anger, with subjection. She and Charles stare at one another, the bruised and the broken-nosed. They stare and stare, attempting to read what they see. Aggressors and victims. Once, years ago, Charles Headleand and Dirk Davis had come to blows, in a carpark in East Acton, on Bonfire Night. Over a union dispute. Blood then had flowed also, and silence had followed. The silence of the seventies, of the eighties.