The Witch of Exmoor (16 page)

As they settled in to their tea, she chatted on, politely, civilly. So good of them to come so far. She'd got their letter, but it was a long way to the post-box, and time passed so quickly here. She'd known they'd find her. She'd been looking forward to seeing them. Benjamin in particular. How was Benjamin?

‘Fine, thanks,' said Benjamin, his mouth full of sandwich. He could not take his eyes off this apparition of his grandmother. ‘Can you get right down to the sea from here? And where did you get that dress?'

‘I'll show you round later,' said Frieda, and proceeded to tell them about the dress. She'd bought it–perhaps Grace would remember?–for the Royal Banquet. And she'd worn it just that once, for the King and Queen, when she went to receive her Swedish medal from the Historical Society for her book on the Iron Coast. The dress had cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds, and it had hung in her wardrobe for years, and was now quite out of fashion. So she had decided to wear it ‘about the house'. She was pleased with that phrase, and repeated it. ‘I wear it', she said, ‘about the house.' She paused, then continued, ‘And I wear my other evening dress, that green striped silk one, as a nightie. This one won't do as a nightie because the sequins prickle and the shoulder pads get caught round your neck when you're asleep. But the green striped one is just fine for bed. And this is just right for tea.' She beamed at them, happily, and with great benevolence.

Oh hard to say what game we play.

After tea, she offered to show Benjamin round the house. She did not offer to take David and Gogo. ‘You two can stay and watch the sunset,' she commanded them, and she set off with her grandson. (The moment Frieda was out of earshot, Gogo leapt up and started to rummage.)

‘Watch out for the stairs,' said Frieda to Benjamin, from time to time. ‘Watch that step. Careful with the doorknob, we don't want to lock ourselves in.'

The house was enormous. Corridor after corridor, room after room. Frieda pointed out that she lived in a small part of it, but that she liked to know the rest of it was there. ‘It's a comfort to me, all this space,' she said, pausing for breath at the top of an attic staircase. ‘All these empty rooms. I
could
go into them. If I wanted.' She coughed, a dry smoker's cough.

Benjamin tagged behind her, gazing at claw-footed baths with corroded bath taps, at leaning wardrobes, at tiles loosened by damp, at crops of woody yellow fungus sprouting from cornices, at delicate thin-stemmed lilac fairy caps growing from window-ledges, at black spatters and dustings of mildew. Only a few of the rooms showed signs of recent habitation, and all of those fronted the sea.

In one of the front rooms, on the top floor, he could see that Frieda worked. Here hung a barometer decorated with marquetry shellwork. It registered that the weather was set fair. A large desk to one side was occupied by a word-processor. The walls were covered with postcards, cuttings and messages, stuck on with drawing-pins and sellotape. A table stood in the window, furnished with an oil lamp, a pair of binoculars and a lantern-globe. ‘Sit down, sit down,and look at the view,' demanded Frieda, and Benjamin obediently sat and stared across the channel at Wales.

She sat by him, and idly span the globe.

‘When I was your age,' she said, ‘I thought I'd visit every country in the world. Now I don't know if I'll even visit every room in this house.' She sighed, impressively.

‘Do you see boats, Grandma?' asked Benjamin, still gazing through the binoculars, adjusting the lenses.

‘Sometimes. Big ones, freighters or tankers, going up to Cardiff, I suppose. And fishing boats. In the summer there's a pleasure steamer called
The Balmoral.
That's quite a sight. There must have been more of that kind of thing in the old days. And they still smuggle, along here. Or so they say.'

‘I can see a boat. A little one, chugging. Is that a smuggler?'

Frieda took the glasses from him, inspected the vessel.

‘Could be. How would you know? More likely mackerel.'

‘Is it deep, the Bristol Channel? Have you ever seen the Severn Bore? Does it go this far?'

‘Full fathom five thy father lies,' hummed Frieda, and fished in her sequined reticule for a cigarette. She lit it with a match, and threw the match out of the window.

‘No,' she said, ‘I've never seen the Severn Bore, but I did see an air sea-rescue. It took hours and hours.'

‘What happened?'

‘There was a boat out there. I heard what I thought were shots, but they must have been flares. And then the helicopter came. It circled and circled. It didn't seem to be able to get near. I don't know what the problem was. It kept circling in, then circling out. Like a dance. Like an insect's mating. It didn't seem to be able to make contact. But maybe it did. Then I saw the hull of the boat rise. And the boat went down. And the helicopter flew away.'

‘Did it rescue the people on the boat?'

‘I don't know. It was too far away. I didn't see the ladder come down.'

‘Did anyone drown?'

‘Frieda shrugged her huge padded sequined wings. ‘I don't know.'

‘Didn't you see in the papers?'

‘I don't see the papers any more.'

‘Didn't you hear on the radio?'

‘I didn't hear anything about it. I do sometimes listen to the radio, but I didn't hear anything.'

‘So you might have watched people drown?'

‘They were too far away.'

‘Grandma?'

‘Yes?'

‘We went down into the caves in the Mendips. Have you ever been down in the caves?'

She shook her head, and he told her about the bottomless void and the Cave of Gloom and the twenty-fifth chamber with no exit. He told her about the one brave man who had dared and dared and failed. She listened, coughing and puffing at her cigarette. She nodded.

‘So you want to dive into the bottomless,' she said. ‘Yes, of course you do. Well, you go on wanting that. And maybe one day you will come up into the pure air, on the other side.'

‘Is there pure air, on the other side?'

‘Who knows? They do not come back to tell us. There must be something, or why would we wish to plunge?'

She threw her cigarette on to the floor, and stubbed it out on the floorboards with a high-heeled
diamanté
slipper. She caught Benjamin's disapproving glance, and cackled.

‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘I won't set myself on fire. This place is so wet, you'd need a few gallons of paraffin to get even a little blaze going. Every night I spend an hour or two with the firelighters. It's hard work, here, keeping warm.'

Benjamin cupped the globe in his hands. Demerara, Cayenne, Isle aux Morts.

‘Come on,' said Frieda. ‘We'd better get back, they'll be wondering if we've fallen off the battlements. I've just one more place to show you before we go. I'll show you my treasure house. Follow me.'

And she set off, down some backstairs with old bell-pulls, to a room that she called the butler's pantry.

‘I don't know if it
was
the butler's pantry,' she said, ‘in fact I don't know what a butler's pantry
is,
do you? But that's what
I
call it. I'm in charge here. I call things what I like. Upstairs, downstairs, what I say goes.'

There were drawers, and cupboards, and a sink with copper taps deeply encrusted with blue-green verdigris.

‘Look,' she said, opening drawers. ‘Here's the family silver. What's not on the tea-table. If they ask you where it is, when I'm dead and gone, you can tell them.'

Wrapped in green baize lay cutlery, candlesticks, sauceboats, ashtrays, monogrammed cigarette cases. A tortoiseshell box with cufflinks. A velvet-lined box with coffee spoons. Pastry forks, fish forks. An ivory-handled ladle. Treasures from a past world.

‘These are Palmer pieces,' she said. ‘There was nothing on the Haxby side. Nothing to speak of. You never met your grandfather.'

She stated this as a fact, inviting no query.

She opened another drawer, full of a tangle of old necklaces of shell, coral, amber, green glass. ‘Nothing valuable here,' she said. ‘Don't let them waste time sorting this lot out. There's nothing here. Except'–and she picked out a square maroon plum leather gold-initialled box–‘except this. This is my best medal. It's probably worth something.'

It lay in its ivory-cream satin nest. A ribboned, enamelled heraldic brooch, gold and blue and yellow, with writing upon it, in Latin and in another language he did not recognize.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘that's probably worth a few bob.'

She fastened the box's little golden hook-and-eye catches, and put it away at the back of the drawer.

‘I suppose you're too old for farm animals,' she said, as she opened the last drawer.

She handed him an old Clark's shoe box. He lifted the damp lid. It contained small chunky animals, crudely hand-carved from wood–cows, horses, pigs, sheep. They were carefully arranged, more lovingly stored than the silver and the beads. They were forlorn yet cherished. Benjamin could see that a whole childhood was preserved in that box. He narrowed his eyes and stared at them. They were full of power. He could awaken them. He stroked their blunt heads with his finger.

‘They were mine,' said Frieda. ‘My father made them for me when I was ill. I was in bed for weeks. He made me a farmyard, and these were the animals. He was a farm labourer, your great-grandfather. He liked the beasts. That's what he called them. The beasts. Though mostly it was ploughing. The sugar beet. And humping sacks.'

She paused. ‘I was in bed for weeks,' she said.

‘What was the matter with you?'

‘I fell off a ladder at the mill. We weren't supposed to be there. We were trespassing. Look'–she pulled up her long skirt, ruching up the fabric to bare her thigh–‘look, there's my scar.'

He stared at the purple-white, shiny, puckered scar on her bluish elderly mottled soft flesh.

‘That's when he made me the animals. I was delirious. They thought I'd got tetanus.' She rolled her skirt down again, to his relief; and laughed. ‘We called it lockjaw, in those days. Terrible things happened to you if you got lockjaw. Fits and spasms. I don't think I had lockjaw, I'd probably have died if I had. I think I just didn't want to tell. It's a fine scar, isn't it?'

‘Ghastly,' said Benjamin, happy to praise it now it was concealed.

‘They couldn't stitch it, too much dirt in it. I was delirious. I thought I could make the animals move.'

‘And couldn't you?'

She looked at him sharply. ‘Well, for me they moved,' she said. ‘But I was only a child.'

‘One last thing,' she said, reaching into the back of the drawer, and taking out a small japanned tea-caddy. ‘Your great-grandfather gave me these too. They were turned up by the plough. He was always hoping to find a golden necklace, or even a coin. Bert Caney found some coins. They're in the museum at Peterborough. But all my father found were these. Do you know what they are?'

Benjamin handled the cool and amber-green, the coiled and wrinkled twists of stone. He shook his head.

‘They're fossils. Fossil shells. But the village people called them the devil's toenails. They were two a penny. They were always turning up. But we liked them, my father and I.'

‘I like them too,' said Benjamin.

‘They're all that's left, of those days,' said Frieda. He was shocked, for tears stood in her old eyes, she blinked, and her firm voice caught and trembled. How could she care for things so long ago? Such small things from so long ago? Was she going to cry? He could not bear it if she cried. But no, she shook herself, her sequins glittered, she was back in the saddle.

‘You can't have them yet,' she said. ‘But when I'm dead and gone, they shall be yours. I'll add them to my will, if I remember. And to Benjamin, the toenails of the devil.'

She put them back in the drawer, briskly wiped her dusty fingers on her dress, and gathered herself together. ‘We'd better get back to your parents,' she said. ‘They'll be nosing around in my secrets. So you've liked your little holiday, have you? You liked Funster Dunster and the Exmoor ponies? Have you seen any deer yet? What the brochures call wild-life is good round here. There's lots of it. I'm studying it. Shall I tell you something? It may come in handy.

 

Crows are green, rooks are blue,
Crows are three and rooks are two,
I may live for ever, and so may you.

 

Remember that, won't you?'

***

The soul and body rive not more in parting
Than greatness going off.

'Tis safer playing with a lion's whelp
Than with an old one dying.

 

On the way back to the hotel, the D'Angers reproached one another. They had been hoodwinked, they had performed none of the tasks they had been dispatched to perform, they hadn't reached the first item on their agenda. Rosemary and Daniel would be outraged at their negligence, their inefficiency. They'd forgotten all about Cate Crowe and contracts and tax forms, they hadn't handed over any of the messages they'd been collecting, they hadn't discovered how many acres went with the house, they hadn't found out whether Ashcombe was freehold or whether the land belonged to the Exmoor National Park, they hadn't asked about insurance or electricity or Calor Gas or telephone messages or postal deliveries or drainage. They'd eaten their tea, and that was about it. True, Gogo had discovered evidence that Frieda seemed to be writing her memoirs–a parish history of Dry Bendish, a report from the village school where Frieda had begun her education, a cutting from a school magazine thanking Mrs Ernest Haxby for her war work, a history of the sugar beet industry in Britain–but she hadn't had time to take it all in, and David had wasted the precious half-hour of Frieda's absence by browsing through some Grimm fairy stories illustrated by Arthur Rackham. He had been attracted to these by a large message stuck on top of an old-fashioned well-worn gold-leafed volume, on a pink Post-It, from Frieda to herself, asking,
DID RACKHAM WORK ON EXMOOR
?
ASK JANE
.