The Witch of Exmoor (20 page)

He's had an easy ride so far. One golden Beetle, driven far too fast by a crazy bald young man and his girlfriend, had brought him all the way from Chiswick. They'd been a laugh. They'd laughed all the way, and shared their cheese and chutney sandwiches. The young man was off to see his mum at Portishead. His mum lived in a maisonette on an estate. Life was dull in Portishead, but they'd be able to stick it for a couple of nights. His mum's cooking was diabolical. He'd warned Sal. The curse of the microwave. Plastic bags in the box. You wouldn't think you could get it as wrong as she did. You'd think it was foolproof, wouldn't you? Oh, come on, said Sal. You wait, said the young man.

Will Paine envies them. They know where they are going. He told them he was going to see a friend in Cornwall. But he hadn't got a friend in Cornwall. He has only a shadow of a plan. The days are getting shorter and colder. It is autumn. The summer is well over. He'd heard there were easy beds in Totnes. He'll try Totnes. Perhaps.

He stands on the slipway, facing the west. A steady stream of cars and lorries passes him. It is early afternoon, and there are a few hours more of daylight. He thumbs mechanically, half-heartedly, in a semitrance, as he thinks of his months inside, of his months with Patsy. He is determined never to see the inside of a gaol again. It had turned his delicate stomach. He thinks of the bit of luck that was Patsy. She had come his way by chance. What had that meant? He thinks of David D'Anger, and all the talk he had overheard. Sometimes, in a dream, he has thought of appealing to David D'Anger: they were both, after all, Caribbean. At some remove, but Caribbean. He has seen David D'Anger on television, he has read him in the papers. He even knows Middleton, which is only fifty miles from his own home town. He had worked there for a couple of months one summer, packaging Cheese and Onion Pasta Twirls, and sleeping in an official council squat with a group of students from Sheffield University. He could almost consider himself one of David D'Anger's constituents. Would it be an abuse of hospitality, to approach David D'Anger? D'Anger must get spongers all the time.

Will Paine thinks of the just society, which has placed him by this roadside, and sent Sal and Steve off to a cosy council estate supper of cling-film-impregnated sliced brown beef with cold gravy; which has driven Simon Palmer into some needled nightmare; which has placed Benjamin D'Anger in a well-run North London comprehensive, the closely supervised darling of both his doting parents; which has set his mother to work on a machine that seals the plastic coating of babies' mattresses, and deprived 8 per cent of its members of any employment at all; which has decreed that some should be non-executive directors of companies on vast salaries, while others should teach small infants or drive long-distance lorries or wipe the tables in the service stations of the land. It is all a mystery. He thinks of poor Prince Charles, a victim if ever there was one, hangdog, depressed, brooding, gloomy, derided, fallen from grace. Will feels very sorry for Prince Charles, who has drawn one of the shortest straws of all. Being a royal has probably always been a bum deal, but these days it's dire. He thinks of Frieda Haxby, of whom he has heard so much gossip, alone in her castle in the west, alone with all her empty bedrooms.

He stands there dreaming, his thumb idly extended, as the sun sinks slowly before him. He manages to feel quite lucky. And lucky he is, for as he lowers his hand to reach into his pocket for a peppermint, he hears a voice calling. A small white van has pulled over, and its driver is leaning out of its open window shouting at him. ‘Hey, you there, d'you want a lift or not?'

Will jumps to, jumps in. His chauffeur is a middle-aged weatherbeaten sixties survivor with long thin straggling hair. He says he is a heating engineer, and he talks relentlessly. Will is a captive audience. Hitch-hikers cannot be choosers. The heating engineer talks about the weather, about the refurbishment of the service station, about VAT, about the government. Will sits quiet and says nothing. It soon becomes clear that his new friend considers himself to be some kind of anarchist, and that he hopes Will will sell him some grass. Will is depressed to find that he can be suspected as a potential dealer or carrier even as he stands on a slip-road in the middle of the countryside: no wonder he had found himself doing three months inside merely for carrying a stash for a friend from one pub to another. Does he really look like a pusher? Obviously he doesn't look innocent, or this nutter in his noisy little cart wouldn't have stopped for him. Would the nutter have stopped for David D'Anger? But David D'Anger wouldn't have found himself hitching along the M5, would he? David D'Anger's got a nice metallic silver-blue Honda, and his wife's probably got another.

In time, unprompted by Will, the conversation drifts from the Somerset police and the Home Secretary to Glastonbury and New Age travellers. Trevor has all the obsequiousness of a bore who wishes to captivate and placate his listener for ever, but Will, who has managed to indicate that he has no dope upon him, is not forthcoming with views on King Arthur and the Criminal Justice Act. He gets himself dropped off at a service station just beyond Taunton. Thence he gets a quick lift to Tiverton, where he spends the night in a room over a pub, and, in the morning, takes stock.

Tiverton is a dump. Will Paine is surprised. He had thought it would be a pretty, West Country market town, full of smiling county people and expensive shops, but it is hilly and grim. Most of the shops seem to be selling second-rate second-hand clothing in aid of obscure charities. The population looks grey and elderly and idle. Will walks along a pedestrianized High Street, through a car park or two, round a market precinct where nothing is happening at all. There is nothing for him here. Where are all the wealthy folk of the soft rich south? Clearly they do not hang out in Tiverton. Will decides to move on. He will hitch north, up over Exmoor, to Frieda Haxby. He will offer his services to Frieda, as gardener, handyman, cleaner, fortune-teller. He can read the Tarot, though he doesn't let on to everyone. Frieda might find a space for him, for a while.

He has a composite image of Frieda, assembled from evenings of eavesdropping, from studying the dustjacket of the ill-starred
Queen Christina,
from family photographs stuck in a collage on the wall of the downstairs cloakroom at the Old Farm. She is rich and famous and eccentric. She might take a fancy to him, who knows? She might disinherit that pampered little D'Anger boy in his favour. Her castle might be stuffed with rich jewels. She had been wearing jewels in some of the family pics–emeralds, pearls, diamonds. Maybe she will bestow them upon him. With such fantasies he entertains himself, as he works his way across the moor.

His last hitch is with a load of doomed cattle on its way to an abattoir. The driver, a taciturn and kindly man, is reluctant to deposit Will Paine by the roadside so far from human habitation, but Will, who has studied the maps, knows that this is the right spot to dismount. He has been evasive about his destination, muttering something about joining some friends with a caravan. The driver wishes him good day. The cramped cattle low. Will Paine sets off along the high coast road, looking for his turning.

And there it is, a sign to Ashcombe. The track plunges down from the road, steeply, past high banks of leathery sprawling rhododendrons. Will shoulders his bag, and starts the long descent. It is late afternoon. The sun sinks to the west.

 

Frieda Haxby is playing patience at a large dining-table which she has lugged to the garden end of what had been the dining-room. The room has long, mullioned windows, and now the bleeding sun pours through their lights on to her cards, her glass of whisky, covered with a postcard against the wasps and flies, her guttering cigarette, and her expanse of papers. From time to time she breaks off from her game to make a note, to turn a page.

Will Paine can see her clearly, through the windows. She is on view. He is concealed in the shrubbery. He has lost his nerve.

The descent had been much longer than he had expected, and he doubts if he'll ever have the strength to climb back up again. It's almost vertical. And he'd been unnerved, on the way down, by nature. There had been squawkings and rustlings in the woods. Distant dogs had barked. He had heard a strange beast's roaring, far away. He had passed a stone hut with a padlocked door and conical towers from which a dull thrumming noise seemed to emanate. He had gone under a gateway, surmounted by a heraldic lion and two griffins, almost overgrown with ivy. He had been through a gate marked
PRIVATE
. He had seen the sign of the vipers. He had heard the melancholy rattle of waves on shingle far below, and the secret voices of contending brooks in the undergrowth. He had flanked the empty walled kitchen gardens.

He had crept down to the large house, quietly. It was much bigger and grander than anything he had imagined. Rosemary Here had been dismissive about it, had made it sound like an old ruin, but it was imposing. It had turrets and battlements and a belfry and a rambling roof system which he had viewed like a bird from the path above. So steep was the drop from the path that he felt he could have jumped on to the roof with one bound. The gardens had once been formal, and the map of their former glory was still plainly visible.

Will Paine is frightened. This place is too much for him. It is spooky. He wishes he hadn't come. How on earth is he going to introduce himself to this mad old woman? She won't be very pleased to see him, now or ever. On the other hand, it will take him a good hour and a half to get back up to the road, and nobody will pick him up at this time of night. He squats back on his haunches in the leafmould, and thinks hard.

Frieda sighs over her patience. It is her fourth deal this evening, and this time it looks as though it's going to come out. For some reason this makes her feel she has been cheating, although she doesn't think she has. Maybe she hadn't shuffled properly?

She has made yet another attempt at her memoirs. Maybe it is another false start. She does not, these days, find writing a pleasant process. She has never enjoyed it much, and looks back now at the facility with which she produced her early work with admiration and disbelief. How had she done such things, burdened as she was with children, husband, sister, mother, and a viper's knot of hatreds? And not only hatreds. There had been other passions, hard now to credit. Ambition must have been one of them, or she would not have been able to lift herself out of the rutted mud. The ambition was her mother's, inherited, transferred, a deadly legacy. Had anything been her own? Had even her husband been her own, or had he too been a legacy?

By writing it down, she hoped to make sense of it, but perhaps there would be no sense. She could not hope to forgive, or to recapture. Love turns to hate by the inexorable law of entropy, but never, thinks Frieda Haxby, can hate ever by the most monstrous effort of the memory or the will be turned back into love. As this landscape, these woods, this body, this country will never be young again, so will hatred never dissolve and be remade as love.

Impossible, to look back and make sense of love, that destructive, inconstant passion, that seems at times so good. But it is not good, whatever the priests and poets say, it is neutral at best, and at worst a killer. Sexual passion dies, that is well known, but so do all other affections. Frieda Haxby tells herself that she does not care for her children, or her grandchildren; she has outgrown them, as years ago she grew out of her love for her mother and her sister. (She cares a little for Benjamin D'Anger, she reminds herself, but only by way of experiment.) They are grown, they may manage without her. They are no longer part of her. She did her best for them, but her best was not very good.

She came to dread her mother, and to hate her sister. She came to hate her husband, but that, she believes, is a common story.

She thinks of the laws of living and the laws of dying, of that severed blob of orange flesh from the sea that had clung to hers. So tenacious, so unformed. And here she is, so complex, and so tired. She has lost that simple will to grip. She turns the cards.

The personal decays from us, leaving us with no memory of it, although we know that it has been. But it was at its strongest nothing more than an evolutionary trick, a spasm of self gripping to a wet rock. We were born without meaning, we struggled without meaning, we met and married and loved and hated without meaning. We are accidents. All our passions are arbitrary, trivial, a game of hazard, like this game of patience which I now play.

Napoleon on Saint Helena. Turner painted him on his last beach, against a red sunset, in exile, staring at an ill-placed, an improbable and outsized rock limpet. He called his piece
The Exile and the War.
So stand I, looking back.

Here comes the knave of clubs, Le Vicomte le Notre, stout and bewigged; Frieda lays him upon the lap of Marie-Leczinska, Queen of Hearts. This is too easy.

(Out there in the shrubbery lurks the Knave of Wolverhampton, working out his approach. This is a complicated building, facing several ways. He does not wish to startle Frieda Haxby by creeping up on her from the rear. But from which direction would she
expect
a visitor? She cannot receive many. Though her grey Volvo is in better working order than he had expected. It is newly washed and waxed. She is not a prisoner here.)

Frieda turns a few more cards, then suddenly sweeps them all in, stacks them, shuffles them, and begins to deal again. She pulls towards her a page of text labelled
DOC:MEM
8 and stares at it as she deals. It reads:

‘I first met Andrew Palmer outside the Rising Sun at Bletchley Park in 1945. It was just before the end of the war. I was still at school. He was in uniform. So was I. He had been sent to meet me by my sister Hilda.'

This statement is true, as far as it goes, but it does not go far. Frieda draws a little sun on the page, in red waterproof de luxe uniball micro, and adds rays. Then she inks in the sun's orb. She tries to remember Andrew Palmer as she had seen him then, sent to her with Hilda's dangerous blessing. Handsome, heroic, yellow-haired, in his RAF bomber jacket.