The Witch of Exmoor (19 page)

On screen, the talk is of income distribution and the concept of relative poverty. D'Anger is good on this topic, they have to admit, and the others make such blisteringly idiotic remarks (‘I prefer not to talk about inequality but about income difference'–that one must be a classic) that they make David sound like the soul of sweet reason. And David's statistics are beautiful. Elegantly, he bowls his fast outswingers; he is the Imran Khan of politics, the well-dressed aristocrat of the sophisticated political game. David plays the Rowntree Report, the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, the latest findings from the Child Poverty Action Group, and an incident he'd observed on the tube on the Northern Line between Chalk Farm and Camden Town. (David, one has to admit, has a brilliant line in grassroots and pavement anecdotes, all of which perforce go unchallenged and unrivalled by his opponents, for none of them, as David manages to insinuate, has ever travelled by public transport. David works the tubes and buses himself partly in the way of research, but they're not to know that.) On this occasion, one of David's adversaries is Milo Barking, a notorious little drunken pundit-whippersnapper, whose hard right-wing line is that all compassion is fake, and not only fake, but debilitating, corrupting, deceitful and dishonest. ‘Let's admit it,' says this white-faced rat, ‘we're all a lot better off than we were in 1979, and we know it, all this talk about poverty is just a new version of Golden Age nostalgia for the Bad Old Days because all you poverty lobbyists see yourselves out of a job in a few months' time–'

‘Oh, come on, Midas,' says David, smoothly intervening in an infuriatingly conciliatory and forgiving tone, ‘we can't all be as clever and lucky as you, I mean we can't
all
strike it lucky with every takeover bid, we haven't got your
nose
for it, you've got to spare a thought for us poor sods who have to earn our livings, and those of us who can't get a job for love or money, and those of us who've got nothing better to do than spend forty-eight hours a week watching prigs like us on TV, reassuring us by telling us how rich we really are. We can't all be winners, you know, some of us have to be the mugs.'

Young Barking looks furious, with real not fake fury, for it is known to some viewers at home and to all in the studio (except that harmless female priest) that his last business venture had hit the skids and was about to be declared bankrupt, and that that was why he was on this TV show, trying to pick up seventy-five quid with expenses and a bit of face. The chairman and producer hover indecisively, wondering whether to encourage Milo Barking to reply and D'Anger to pursue, but decide against it: there was libel in the air, and anyway they feel sorry for Barking, who is bound to make a brilliant comeback. Anyone could go bust, it wasn't his fault he'd been taken for a ride by the big boys. They cut to the female priest.

At home, in the belly of their waterside white elephant, Rosemary and Nathan exchange glances. They know the inside story of Barking's financial disaster, but wonder how the hell David D'Anger got to know these things. He'd come a long way since the innocent days when he was teaching Politics and Philosophy. Sinister, really.

‘I suppose,' says Rosemary, winding up her ball of scarlet wool and piercing it with her crochet hook, ‘I suppose he has a whole team of researchers, sniffing out the dirt for him. Is that how it works?'

‘Don't ask me,' says Nathan. ‘I didn't think he could afford that kind of back-up.'

‘Doesn't it all come with the job?'

‘He hasn't got the job yet.'

‘Oh, come off it, he's got lots of jobs.'

‘I don't know anything about it,' says Nathan, who has in fact heard a rumour that David D'Anger has been seen once too often lunching with a neoGothic miniskirted redlipped Fleet Street floozie; he hopes to prevent himself from passing this poisoned nugget of gossip on to his wife, as it is quite likely to be untrue, and even if it were true, why upset or, more likely, gratify Rosemary? Nathan feels a solidarity with David. Gogo Palmer D'Anger is frigid, marmoreal and self-righteous. He rather hopes David is having a fling. He himself has had a few, as David knows: nothing too serious, nothing marriage-threatening, but pleasant in their way. He has had his secrets. One he keeps.

‘I'm off to bed,' says Rosemary. She reminds him that she has to catch an early flight to Glasgow. She hovers, her hand on a lights witch.

‘OK, OK,' says Nathan. It never ceases to annoy him, the way she will announce the obvious, the way she seems to expect him to follow her to bed. What does she suspect? He's grown up now, he can sit and watch TV all by himself if he wants. He sits out the current affairs for a few moments more after her departure, switches off as the conversation turns to drugs in athletics (Nathan, like much of the nation, is by now in favour of a Drugs Olympics, and to hell with fair play), and then opens the curtains, heaves himself to his feet, opens a slice of window, and steps out on to the split-level balcony. This is his view. He has seen smarter views–new ones, downstream, from some of the more recent developments, and old ones, upstream, along the Upper Mall. But this is his. He likes it. It is Southwark, it is real. The Thames is very low tonight, and a dank smell of wharfmud rises to his sensitive nostrils. He sniffs, inhales.

There is London, to right and left of him, glittering with religion, art and commerce. From this distance, in this obscurity, London looks fine. Dickens would think things had come on a long way since the days of the bodysnatchers and the river rats and the suicides. The skull-dome of St Paul's still looms across the water, bleached and fluted white-blue in its floodlight, and to either side of it Nathan can see towers and spires. Over there, somewhere, though he cannot see her, stands Justice with her sword and scales. And over here, on what he thinks of as his bank, there is development–a reconstructed Elizabethan theatre with a grass roof, converted warehouses, shopping malls, office towers, museums, clinks and tourist pubs where once Ben Jonson and Will Shakespeare drank. Maybe it is all fine, maybe Rat Barking is right to hymn the rising tide of prosperity. Maybe Rat Barking is right to point out that the Poverty Lobby is always with us, and that it is self-serving and self-perpetuating. Those same old caring faces do pop up again and again, as they rotate from Campaign to Campaign, from Charity to Charity, begging from and bleating at the hard-working wealth-creating rich. Nathan's never had all that much time for the Poverty Lobby, although he has been known to chuck a fist full of fivers (fluttering, pale blue and pink silver-threaded fivers) at the beggars beneath the bridge. (One of the beggars once had the cheek to hold a fiver up to the light, to see if it was real. Maybe it's true that beggars are getting aggressive, dangerous?)

Most evenings, when he is at home and can get rid of Rosemary, Nathan comes to look at this view. He cannot leave this place. He would like to, but he is bound to it. The water is low tonight, it slaps at the wooden piles and fenders.

Nathan is convinced he will die shortly of a heart attack. Most of the time he considers this to be more or less inevitable. His father had died at the age of fifty-four, and so will he. Nathan has insured and assured and double-indemnified his life, so that's all right. Everyone will be fine except himself, and as he'll be dead, he'll be all right too. Or so he tells himself.

Nathan's mother can't think why he and Rosemary and the children want to live South of the River, in an area with an E in its postcode. Your grandparents, she tells Nathan, worked day and night to move west. To her, Nathan's expensively converted apartment with its river view still stinks of poverty and the old East End. Nathan's mother hasn't moved with the times. She won't even eat food with an E in it. She is shocked to hear that Nathan and Rosemary eat out most evenings and, as often as not, apart. When do the children get a proper meal? Do they live on snacks and microwave dinners?

Nathan cannot leave the river. Occasionally Rosemary suggests that they move, for she is not so fond of the area, some of which remains dismally undeveloped. She says she does not like to get out of her car at night, even in the underground car park. She says she does not like the dark menace of the streets–the hints of portcullis, guillotine, noose, spike and chain that Unger on like instruments of torture in the ancient architecture. She does not like the embattled river, with its heavy dredgers, its rusting buoys. But Nathan stonewalls. It is convenient, and they cannot afford to move, he says. They must wait for the rest of the neighbourhood to improve, for the market to shift, he says. But his real reason is other.

Nathan cannot leave because he holds a ghostly tryst with this stretch of the Thames. Here, in the dark water, not far from where he now stands, young Belle was drowned.

Belle was drowned when the pleasure boat,
The Marchioness,
went down, sunk by
The Bowbelle.
Belle had been partying. And now she is dead. Fifty-two drowned. Belle was the last of the list.

Belle was twenty-six when she died. Nathan had adored her. He thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. This was ridiculous, as by advertising standards, she was nothing special. And yet, he repeats to himself like a mantra, she was the most beautiful girl I ever saw.

She had worked for the firm, and her work had been lowly. But all had adored her. Her laughter had rung out, down corridors, over telephones, in the lift, through the walkways of the open plan. Her face was as open and as glorious as the sky itself. She was radiant. Her wide brow, her brown eyes, her chestnut hair, her cream-pale skin. Her skin, so supple, so innocent, so untouched. She had broad shoulders, full soft breasts, white hands, careless clothes. She was a radiant, art student mess. Cheap bangles, crumpled shirts hanging out over her trousers, not-so-little laced boots (she had big feet). She wore rings on her fingers, and punning bells in her ears, which jingled when she shook her head. Dull men smiled when they saw Belle, and unhappy women unfolded their secrets to her. Belle was fearless, and she rejoiced them with her escapades. She could walk safely through the city night. She charmed the lonely from the edge of tenth-floor sills, she led the wicked to safety, she disarmed the mugger and bought drinks for the homeless and the mad. She knew the pubs, the manors, the estates.

Nathan had propositioned her, one evening, as they descended late in the thick-carpeted static-thrilled office lift. He'd offered dinner, he'd thrown himself upon her mercy. And when she had taken in what he was offering, she had laughed and laughed. Then she had shared the joke. ‘But
hey,
Nathan, didn't you
know?'
she had said, laying her lovely white hand, with its slightly bitten nails, upon his. ‘Didn't you
know?
I live with Marcia. I never
ever
go out with men. I couldn't go out with a
man.'

As she took in his expression of surprise, which he had been unable to disguise quickly enough, she threw an arm around him and violently patted his back. ‘Oh, I'm so sorry, Nathan, you
didn't
know, I thought
everybody
knew,' she had cried. And of course, the moment he knew, he knew. She was, as he in that instant saw, of the essence of camp. That was how she made her way through life so gaily. That laughter, that tireless patience with all comers, that indiscriminate good nature. To her, all the world was one glorious joke, and although at this moment the joke was on him, he was invited to share it. So he took her out to dinner anyway, and over a platter of smoked fishes and brown bread and butter they continued to rejoice. They consummated their affair with a wicked froth of egg and cream and sugar and Grand Marnier, and then they kissed and parted and Belle whisked home to share the joke with Marcia. Nathan thenceforth adored Belle. She was his mistress, his daughter, his friend, his salvation: she was the bride of all the world. His heart sang whenever he saw her, whenever he heard her lovely, unlikely, beautiful name.

And then, one night, outside his window, Belle and fifty-one others had drowned, while out on a pleasure trip. The whole office went into mourning for Belle. It was not possible that she was dead. As easily might one extinguish the sun itself. Stunned with disbelief, her friends and colleagues exchanged bewildered words, clubbed together for a wreath, attended her funeral. There was an inquest, then another inquest. It emerged that Belle's hand, at the command of the coroner, had been severed after death, for purposes of finger-print identification. When Nathan heard this he thought he would die. Belle's hand, with its little wrist, its bitten nails, its cheap and innocent and silly rings. Belle's hand on a block.

Surgically removed, the coroner said. Severed, he meant.

Now, whenever he gazes at the dark water and thinks of Belle's hand, his eyes fill with tears. And thus he knows he is still human. She has left him this enormous, this generous gift. He sometimes feels himself to be a mean small man in a mean small world, indifferently married, indifferently unfaithful to his wife, and intermittently bored by his work. He has made bad choices and shored them up with worse. But he can weep for Belle. The tears which her name and her white hand induce are most precious to him.

The dark water beneath him stands still. It is on the turn. The river has drained to the marshes, and soon the sea will flood back, silently. The salt will surge back, pulled by the moon, to merge with the fresh river waters of the land, there, beneath his window, where Belle died. It is a twice-daily miracle. ‘Belle,' he murmurs. The waters tremble as they meet. How
can
she be dead? Is her death too some profound and beautiful joke? As inexplicable, as lovely, as her short and blessed life?

 

Will Paine stands by the roadside on the M5, at the Gordano Service Station Exit, his worldly possessions in a canvas bag. He is thumbing his way westwards. Since Patsy Palmer kicked him out, he has not fared well. Now he looks back to the summer he spent with her at the Old Farm as to a Golden Age. Had she really fed him, and given him pocket money, and given him a bed in the attic? He cannot understand why she had ever been so gracious to him, and repents that he has at times thought ill of her. He regrets too that he never warned her about Simon, who is going crazy. Either Simon is out of his mind with the wrong kind of drugs–Will Paine is an expert on good and bad drugs, and is wary of the difference–or he has a mental illness. Or both. Simon will end up feeding himself to the lions in the zoo, or murdering a stranger in a tiled underpass. Simon has the city sickness. Will has seen its symptoms many times. Pallor, fever, anger, palsy, fear. The glancing over the shoulder, the demanding with menaces. Will should have warned Patsy, who has been good to him, but he had felt it was not his place. He had not dared. Once he had tried, but Patsy had not been willing. So he is walking away from the problem, from the memory. He is heading for the west, away from the city.