The Witch of Exmoor (21 page)

She'd been too young to be allowed in the pub. He'd led heir back to Hilda's billet. She'd been thrilled by Andrew. Well, she was only sixteen, and there was a war on. Should she blame herself for what had happened? Or should she blame Hilda for setting it up? Or should she blame Andrew for weakness, for vanity, for taking advantage, for playing sister off against sister? There hardly seemed to be any point in blaming Andrew Palmer. He'd been a bit player, a nobody. The father of her three children. The pieces had all been in place before Hilda had met Andrew. Before the war broke out. Nothing was Andrew's fault. She could see that now. Is he alive or dead, she wonders, or is he still skulking in the Orient? Last heard of in Singapore.

Reduce, reduce. Everything dwindles, everything shrinks. A blue ballgown hangs limp on a brass rail in an Oxfam shop. It has had its last outing.

Those had been the days of clothing coupons. She had married in a white dress cut out of parachute silk. The days of peace and austerity. But why bother to remember all of that? Tinned cream, tasting of white chalk paste.

Andrew wasn't even seriously interested in women. That had been one of the ironies. He had destroyed one, and done his best to destroy another, but he hadn't wanted either of them. He had run off to Ceylon with a German film-maker. Andrew had been a clever boy, a mathematician, a talker, a spark. A weak and pretty face, as she now remembered it. He'd been a trouble-maker. He had loved trouble. Vain, dependent, narcissistic, androgynous. What had he thought he was playing at, with the Haxby sisters? They were not his style. They came from a different, a bloodier, a more matriarchal mythology.

The three Palmer children had shown little curiosity about their absent father. They had smelt dishonour and wanted none of it. Frieda has warped them all by her silence. It is too late now to advertise for Andrew Palmer, to set the detectives on to him. She sometimes wonders if he has followed her career. Hard to remember that she had once suffered over his infidelity and his disappearance. Although he loved trouble, Hilda Haxby's death had been too much for him, and he had run away with Otto Weinberg, who made movies about oil-wells. A coward and a traitor. Maybe he was long dead.

It hardly seems worth recalling his successors in her affections. Yet at the time they had been important to her. After Andrew, she had favoured more fleshly men, men of substance. Some of them had died corpulent deaths. Some lived and flourished–the Swede still sent her postcards from his many conferences, and recently an ageing Irish lover had written to her, out of the blue, after two decades of silence, asking if she remembered the night they'd spent together in Heidelberg so many many years ago. Did she remember that they had ordered Steak Tartare, not knowing, in their innocence and ignorance, what it would prove to be? And had she been sick in the night because of the rawness of the steak, or because of him? Could she please let him know? It was important to him.

And, her memory thus prompted, she had recalled in detail this long forgotten night. They had arrived late at the inn. Neither then spoke German, and tourism had not then invaded the Rhineland. The menu had been uncompromisingly German, and they had ordered steak, expecting at worst a chunk of charred tough meat with large white boiled potatoes. But there on their plates had reposed a small dome of red raw flesh, surrounded by a necromantic circle of strange little chemical pyramids of peppers and spices–green, red, black, yellow, crystal white. A golden raw egg yolk in a halved eggshell had topped each frightening bloody pap. They had stared in mutual alarm, yet they were hungry, and had eaten bravely and stubbornly, ignoring the condiments, consuming the meat. After the meal they had taken themselves to their room, where they had found their bedding as foreign, as unaccommodating. A high wooden bed, a rigid bolster for pillow, a feather duvet of vast sighing dusty mountain ranges for their covering. It had taken courage to plunge into that structure, but they had forced themselves, for their desires had been overwhelming. And then, when what had to be done had been done, Frieda had got up and taken herself to the bathroom and vomited up the lot. The meat, the beer, the man.

How could she have forgotten this disgraceful episode, and why had he remembered it? She wrote back, warily, telling him that as far as she could recall it had been the unfamiliarity of the repast–had there not been sauerkraut on the side?–that had produced her nausea, not his sexual activities. But she would not go into more detail until he told her why he wished to know. And he had written back, from Bellagio, saying that he wished to set the record straight. ‘I am writing my memoirs, here in Bellagio,' he had informed her. ‘And I wished to know the worst. So write to me again, Frieda sweetheart, and tell me all you know.'

She had replied tersely, on a postcard: Til leave you out of my memoirs if you leave me out of yours. That's a fair offer. F.H.P.'

And indeed she had so far left him out, and all the others: at this snail's pace she would never reach him, even though he had figured so early in her amorous career. (Her German, now, is quite passable.)

Is she the same person as that woman who had sweated and moaned with multiple orgasms in that vast antique Germanic feather bed? Is it this body that had eaten that meat? She sometimes wonders. The problem of continuity perplexes her. Has she split off for ever from that rapacious, relentless girl who had devoured and spewed out Andrew Palmer, after screwing three children out of him? A memoir should establish continuity, but sometimes she wonders if the links exist. Can she be held responsible for crimes committed so long ago? Can Hilda? Can Andrew? Were they the same people then as they are now? Hilda is long dead, so her mortal being has stayed the same, fixed at the age of thirty-two in her final act of cruelty, of selfishness, of Pyrrhic victory, of who knows what fleeting angry despair. But Andrew–is he, if he lives, the man who fathered the children, the youth who flew an aeroplane and got back alive, the boy whose grandfather had served in India? Would they recognize one another if they were to meet now? Is any of their flesh the same as that flesh that touched, and rubbed, and fused?

And what about teeth? Surely these teeth are the same teeth? She runs her tongue against her bridge, lifts it, joggles it. She still has most of her own left. She detests her bridgework.

Her mother, Gladys Haxby née Bugg, had been keen on continuity. She had invoked Vikings and Norse gods and longships. She had claimed for her children a Nordic inheritance which, who knows, may well have been fact, not fiction. The Haxbys and the Buggs must have come from somewhere. Frieda and Hilda had imbibed a good deal of dubious folk history from their mother, a package of disinformation from which Frieda had been rescued by an exceptional history teacher at Scalethwaite Grammar School, a teacher whom Frieda, if she were more generous, could credit with much of her later success. It was Miss Mee, not Gladys Bugg Haxby, who had set Frieda on a true course. Nevertheless, Frieda owes some of her intimations to her mother. She has had moments of ancestral recognition, when facing a certain combination of blue sky and low golden grassland and blue water, when laying her hand on an old stone, when gazing at a brown furze upland, or an iron crag, or a fjord. She had not been lying when she had told the disc jockey about her mystic moment by the runic stone.

In recent years, Frieda has taken the trouble to check some of the fanciful notions which her mother had imparted. And she had discovered that there had been Haxbys in Lincolnshire and South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire for a few centuries, though none of them had been in any way remarkable. Ernie Haxby had been a farm labourer, not a Viking. The Buggs had been Lincolnshire folk, and Frieda had been pleased to note that the word ‘Bugg'–Danish, Old Norse?–was said to mean crooked, swollen, bulging, officious and proud. Pleased also was she to discover that one of her mother's favourite grammatical constructions, involving the strongly stressed terminal preposition, was derived from the Scandinavian: every time Gladys declared, ‘If you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry
for,'
she was recalling the linguistic roots of her race.

Oh, yes, there had been an inheritance. A handful of phrases, an old colouring book of the Norse gods with sub-Burne-Jones illustrations, very badly inked in by Hilda. A pre-war rag book of nursery rhymes. A rare Bank Holiday outing to Bayard's Leap, near Sleaford, with her father, to see the marks of the leap of the famous horse. (Ernie had brought her home from the fields a lucky horseshoe once. She had it still.) And Frieda had been drawn to the north–to its words, its music. (Wagner, so late in the day, had been a revelation.) Why else had she been so dangerously attracted to the Iron Coast, and to Queen Christina? She can blame Gladys and her blood for this.

But what, Frieda asks herself, is all this mish-mash of the past? What does it
mean?
Can she stick it all together, or is it too late? She thinks it is too late. Each time she sorts out one strand, others entangle her. The world must spin on. Europe has had its day. Better to cut the links, better to stop thinking, better to liberate the young, to set them free. Well, she has done her best to see to that. She has made her will. They won't like it one bit.

Frieda Haxby, an old rationalist, an enlightened one, a lateral thinker, has come here to get rid of thinking and of reason. And here she has heard voices and dreamt dreams. She is trying to will herself into another medium.

She gets up, crosses to the sideboard, pours herself another three fingers of Scotch, adds a dash of water from a brown jug. Will Paine watches her intently. He cannot hear what she is saying, but he can see her lips move. She is talking to herself.

She sits again, and begins to move the cards.

She is speaking to herself of her dreams.

She had dreamt, the night before, both of evolution and of death. In the evolution dream, she had watched one of the little nameless fish that come up with the high tide clamber out of the water on to the shingle. It had grown legs, as does a tadpole, then had risen on its haunches, and grown larger, and hairier, until it was larger than a man. In her dream she had labelled it ‘a dangerous species'. Fierce, grim, hairy, primitive, it had loped off into the woods, and she had woken, pleased with her dream logic.

The second dream, the death dream, which came towards dawn, had been less pleasing, and more realistic. She dreamt of her friend Patrick Fordham, the actor. He was dying, and he was holding court upon his deathbed. Frieda had been solemnly received at the ceremony of farewell. Patrick was bald and emaciated, and he knew that he had precisely one day to live. The next day he would die. He was surrounded by monks or courtiers, obsequious, attentive. They ushered her into the presence. Patrick was lying on a draped litter. She forced herself to bend over him, to try to say something meaningful, on this, the last day of his mortal life. What could one say in the presence of certain death? She had uttered, ‘You know how much our friendship has always meant to us, Patrick,' but to her horror he gave a horrible little sneer in response to this speech. Then she bent over him, and kissed his bare skull, knowing that this was what she had to do, and he winced and turned away and said, ‘I'm sorry, I'm so tired, I'm so tired.' And Frieda knew that she had offended, and indeed she herself had offended herself, for both her words and her action had been hollow. She had valued his friendship, but not much, and her reluctance to kiss that diseased skull had been more powerful than her affection. But she had to stand there, as his attendants discussed his imminent death, and the disposal of his body. He would be buried the next day in Tadcaster, and his body would lie there for a year and a day, and then it would be transported to its final resting place at Bury St Edmunds. To Frieda's surprise Patrick seemed to find this information soothing, more soothing than he had found her own efforts, and she despised him for taking comfort from it. The pomp of his death–for clearly there was great honour in lying for a year and a day in Tadcaster–had reassured him. Even here, with less than a day to live, he had been pleased to find himself surrounded by ceremony and flattery. He who had played the king would die deceived like a king.

As Frieda had stared at his bone-thin death face, she saw that his skin, before her eyes, was taking on a different colour. He was turning turquoise. Not corpse green, but a bright, strong, burnished, ornamental turquoise, like a Mexican deathmask. He had willed himself to mineral and metal. Frieda turned away from him, and woke.

But the dream had stayed with her, as clear and as uncomforting as truth.

‘AIDS and leprosy, status and vanity,' she says to herself, aloud, as she turns up the cards. Why does she dream so much of death? Her dreams are omens sent from the other world. Does she fear death? Patrick is only sixty, but she believes that her dream means he is doomed. Is she also doomed, and is she afraid? She cannot find it in her to think that she is. Patrick had been afraid, but she thinks she is not.

Resignation, indifference, despair. Calm of mind, all passion spent.

Of course, in a novel, she tells herself, this is the moment at which she would discover herself to have a mortal illness, an illness which would inspire her with a new desire to survive, to triumph over the Black Ace. And she has been coughing rather a lot lately.

It is not an illness that stalks her, but Will Paine from Wolverhampton. He has been round to what he takes to be a front door, and knocked. He is not surprised that she does not answer: how could she have heard him? He tries a sidedoor, in the wall of the arch, the door that Benjamin had discovered. It stands half open, and looks promising. Again, she does not answer, but he has roused an old, mild, shabby black and white sheepdog, which approaches him, wagging its tail, lowering its head in deference, showing the humble whites of its eyes. Will is nervous of dogs, but manages to pat this one: the dog cringes gratefully and lets out a very low servile whine.