The Witch of Exmoor (12 page)

We will go back to Hampshire, and see what has happened at the Old Farm. We will be more welcome there.

It is now the Sunday afternoon of that same long weekend, and the little cousins, Jessica, Jonathan and Benjamin, are upstairs, packing up the Game. They have been bleary-eyed all day, for they had played for four hours the night before; Benjamin had been on super-inventive form. It had been almost too exciting. When will they have a chance to play again? There has been some talk about a joint family holiday in a borrowed house in Italy in early September, but the children do not think it will come to anything. And anyway, the Game belongs here, in Emily's wardrobe. The children are accustomed to their parents pretending to make plans, then doing nothing about them. This summer, the Herzes are off for a week's cruise of the Aegean, leaving their children in Golders Green with their good grandmother; the D'Angers are too busy to get away; the Palmers will be staying in Hampshire through August. Their best bet for a reunion, the little cousins guess, is another crisis over Grandma Frieda. A second crisis would reconvene them.

They wrap the little riflemen and toy animals in soft cotton squares from Patsy's abandoned patchwork quilting, and lay them in their boxes, tenderly. They hope that something awful happens soon, to bring them all together again. Jon and Jess sense that if too much time passes, Ben will outgrow the Game, and then they will never discover its meaning, its dreadful, its unimaginably thrilling climax.

David and Gogo also pack their weekend bags, and strip their pillowcases from their pillows. They are good guests. Rosemary and Nathan, as they pack more messily in the bedroom over the corridor, argue about whether it has been a good idea to delegate the next visit to Exmoor to David and Gogo. Will they drive down and purloin the family silver, the family secrets?

Rosemary has not recovered from her own sense of shock, and is hurt that the others do not take it seriously. It was partly for their sake that she had made the journey, now all they can do is mock.

Th ey gather downstairs, say their farewells. The Herzes are giving Simon Palmer a lift to London, and he climbs into the back of their car with Jon and Jess. Daniel has returned from driving the Partingtons home; Daniel follows the can along the gravel drive, across the cattle grid. He is taking Jemima for a walk. As he walks, in the summer evening, he thinks about cultural appropriation. The concept sets his teeth on edge. So does the notion of the Veil of Ignorance. It strikes him, as he walks, that David D'Anger is a shocking fraud. A hypocrite, a pretender. Hidden behind seven veils of academic obfuscation, cultural plausibility and good intentions. An intruder, a thief in the night. Daniel is slightly surprised to find himself thinking these intolerant thoughts. What can David tiave said to irritate him so much? He slows down, pauses, stands still, as the old spotty bitch squats by the path. Can there be any threat to him, in anything David D'Anger has; said? No, surely not.

And perhaps that is enough, for the moment, of domestic friction. Let us widen the circle. We need a new character. It is time to introduce the man from the attic, the man from the garden shed.

The man from the attic has emerged from hiding, and now he is sitting at the kitchen dining-table, shelling broad beans. Patsy is blanching and freezing them. There is a glut. He squeezes the pods, and takes out the plump, pale-green embryos from their silvery furred sheaths. He places them in a pudding bowl and drops the pods, already blackening, into a basket on the floor.

His name is Will Paine, and we have not met him before because he is shy. It is as simple as that. Patsy would include Will in family meals, she would happily (indeed with malicious pleasure) force him upon the attention of His Honour Judge Partington, but Will Paine is shy, and she respects his reluctance to be shown off. It is a pity that he would not meet David D'Anger, for David would surely have found him of sociological interest, but there you are: you can't control everything, even if you have the righteous confidence of a Patsy Palmer.

Patsy and Will Paine met in Winchester Gaol, where Will was serving a sentence for peddling grass to the middle classes of Stoke Newington. Patsy had found out all about it, and had been shocked on his behalf. The sentence had seemed excessive for so small a crime, and very unlikely to do him or anyone any good at all. Will is not, Patsy maintains, the criminal type. He is a lost boy, looking for a good cause.

He is half-coloured. He says his father is a Jamaican, and Patsy assumes he is telling the truth. (He is.) He says he comes from Wolverhampton, and here he cannot be lying, for his accent bears witness to his honesty. His mother now works in Bilston, in a factory that makes cot mattresses. She had, when Will was a baby, worked as an office cleaner.

Will is thin, slightly framed, and pretty. His smile is hopeful, his long neck bare and tender. He wears an earring and his hair is close cropped, sitting neatly on his finely sculpted skull. His skin is palish brown, shades lighter than David D'Anger's: he could almost pass for white, were it not for something deliberately exotic in his manner, a cultivated elegance suggestive of the West Indies he has never visited. Frankly, to be blunt about it, he is too nice-looking to be pure-bred English. The pure-bred English are a motley, mottled, mongrel ugly breed, blotched with all the wrong pigments, with hair that does not do much for them at all. The English are clumsy and gross and at the same time runtish. They do not make the best of themselves. Their bodies are thick, their faces either pinched and beaky like mean birds or shapeless as potatoes. Will Paine is a beautiful hybrid, grafted on to old stock. Both his mother and his father are large (his father, now returned to Jamaica, an eighteen-stone bathroom-scale-crushing dashing desperado, his mother sad and spreading from pie and chips and hot sweet tea). Will Paine is slender like an athlete, like a dancer. He is a mystic and he believes in vegetables and stars and cosmic correspondences. Even now he is explaining to Patsy Palmer the properties of the broad bean, which signifies, he assures her, prosperity in the sign of the water-carrier, good health to the liver, and nourishment for the left-hand side of the brain.

‘You see the way they grow,' he says, showing her the little white spriglet at the bottom of the cleft of the swollen seam, ‘they turn to the left, when they grow. They reach to the light, but the leaves always turn to the left.'

‘Are you sure?' says Patsy, who does not believe in humouring the dotty, even when they happen to be ex-convicts under her own protection.

‘No, not really,' says Will, smiling disarmingly. ‘It's what I read in this book.' His smile is crooked, charming. His front teeth are both slightly chipped, evenly chipped, giving him a sharp, elfin look.

He recants so quickly that Patsy recants too. ‘You may be right,' she said. ‘I've forgotten all I ever knew about photosynthesis and the climbing habits of plants. We used to grow beans in jars with blotting paper. I don't suppose they do that kind of thing at school now. It's all computers now.' She sighs for innocence lost.

Will frowns, and continues to pod on. He is puzzled by Patsy, who seems to him to be a mass of contradictions. Here she is, like a good housewife, a good earth mother, freezing vegetables for the winter nights, vegetables which she has grown in her own garden and fed with her own compost. (She gets very little help, as far as he can see, from the aged once-a-week gardener.) Here she is sighing nostalgically about her innocent schooldays. And yet she lets her own children get away with murder. Will Paine wonders if Patsy has any idea of what Simon gets up to in his parents' absence? Will, who is now trying to go straight, would always have drawn the line at some of it–asking for trouble, the road to hell. Will has seen it all and he knows. Simon is a mad boy, a lost cause. Patsy does not even notice. And it's not only the drug scene. The stuff she lets them watch, those videos she has lying around all over the house. She must know what's in those nasty little black boxes, because she watches it herself. Doesn't it cross her mind that it might not be
good
for people to watch that kind of shit? Simon and Emily are her own children, and he supposes it's her business if she wants to let them deprave themselves, but he'd been shocked to see that she'd left it all lying around when those other little kids came for the weekend. Luckily they hadn't seemed interested, or he might have tried sneaking the worst of them out of their way, up to the attic. He couldn't sit through that junk himself. No way. It makes him feel faint. The sight of blood, the body parts, the meat.

He had been interested to learn that David D'Anger was, like himself, a vegetarian. He almost wishes he had plucked up courage and come down to say hello, instead of skulking up there with his tranny and his earplugs, instead of eavesdropping down the backstairs. He would have liked to have heard more of that conversation about the Veil of Ignorance. He had eavesdropped through most of David's exposition of John Rawls's Theory of Justice as Parlour Game, and had spent much of the night pondering its implications, wondering if he too, like Nathan, would give it a whirl and go for change. On the whole, he thinks not. He's been pretty lucky, most ways, and has a lot to lose. Being born in Wolverhampton in 1969 had been a cushy number compared with some. Look at those poor buggers in Rwanda. Africa was a fuck-up, man. He couldn't credit some of" the rubbish he heard, from Afro-Brits, about their African roots. He could just about get his mind as far as Jamaica, and one day he'd go there, one day he'd go and see where he came from, but as for going all the way
back again,
back through history, back to Africa and the bush and the jungle–no way. The buck's got to stop somewhere. Americans are barmy, Africa's full of murderous violent bastards. You can see them on TV. Give me Wolverhampton, give me Stoke Newington.

But of course no one will give him either Wolverhampton or Stoke Newington. They won't give him anything. When Patsy Palmer chucks him out, as he knows she will, as he knows she must, he has nowhere in the wide world to go. He has nowhere and nobody. He bites his lip, throws the last fleshy integument on to its ripped and slaughtered fellows, and wipes his hands on his trousers. How has he come to this? How has he, a nice chap like him, ended up in such dire, such lost, such
hopeless
loneliness? He knows he is nice-looking, but he does not fancy the blokes that fancy him. Sex unnerves him, he cannot do it. He's frightened of the big boys, the big-time. He's willing to work, but what can he do, who will employ him? Will Patsy be able to help? Has she a plan for him? He looks at her, as she plunges the last batch of blanched beans into iced water, and tries to read her face. Can she be trusted? Does she know how to help, beyond this room, beyond this small daily task?

She catches him looking at her, returns from her own thoughts to him, smiles, says briskly, rather too loudly, as though to a public meeting, ‘Well
done,
Will. You're an ace. Be an angel, take the shells out to the compost for me, and the other compost bucket, while you're at it. Five pounds at least, I'd say, wouldn't you?'

No, she does not know how to help.

He picks up the basket and the bucket, and goes out through the back door, past the gumboots and walking sticks and dog dishes, and down the track to the vegetable garden. He wonders how he would make out if he had been born in Jamaica. If he had been born in this house. If he had been born in China. If he were to win the lottery. Would he still be himself, Will Paine?

He tips out the eggshells, the beanpods, the burnt toast, the potato peelings, the wilted lettuce. The leavings of the feast. In America, he has heard say, they throw out more food a day than Africa consumes in a month. If you don't eat what's on the table in an American restaurant it gets trashed, even if it's still in its cellophane wrapper. That's what he's heard.

He doesn't want to live on leftovers for the rest of his life. He wishes he could push a button and send the whole lot spinning round. Level the food mountains, let the wine lakes flow to the sea. He's heard tell of a computer game, where instead of killing monsters or rescuing maidens you could cause famines and gluts. You could play with the distribution of the earth's resources. You could make the desert blossom and parch the rain forest. What would happen, he wondered, if you spread everything thinly and absolutely evenly and gave everyone a bit of everything? Was that what Emily had been hinting at?

He shakes his head. He knows his brain does not work well. It is undeveloped, and he has messed it up with hash, for only when he is high does he feel less than utterly alone. People tell him his IQ is fine, but he knows better. In prison he had started an O-Level course or two, to fill in the time, but he knows he has no staying power. He bends like a reed. His mind bends. He is pliant, suppliant. These English, they are bred to hold on, like terriers. They hold on to their own interests even while they smile and offer shelter. Nothing will dislodge them.

He wonders if Patsy is right to put teabags in the compost. Are they biodegradable? He pokes the decaying mess with a garden fork, levels it, pats it down, conscientiously abstracts a cigarette butt, which certainly should not be there, drops it in the blue plastic bucket called Lucy.

David D'Anger is a traitor. He has joined the English. So says Will Paine to himself, as he walks back to the house. But he doesn't believe it. David D'Anger is a lucky man, that's all, a lucky man with staying power. You can see his mind follow through. Beware of envy, says Will Paine to himself, envy's a killer. He has seen it kill.

It's not right, that he should nurse this aching solitude. True, Simon and Emily speak to him, Patsy speaks to him, even Daniel sometimes nods at him. But they don't rate him, any more than they rate their poor dumb dog. And they're not all that nice to the dog. He's seen Simon kick the dog.