The Witch of Exmoor (30 page)

David decides to be bold and to speak to Nathan. Nathan is supposed to be a practical man, a man of business (though Daniel has at times had his doubts about this). He rings at seven in the morning from his Holiday Inn in Chester, and reads out to him the offending paragraphs. To his dismay Nathan laughs heartily, though not very happily, and says that although he could do with £20,000 right now, he can't think that all that Just Society nonsense could stand up in a court of law. Yet he agrees that it would simply waste Frieda's posthumous income if they were to challenge it. Better to let Goltho & Goltho give it to little Benjie, says Nathan. He's a nice boy, maybe he'll help us out in our old age. ‘The Just Society,' repeats Nathan, with finely dramatized incredulity. ‘She might as well have left it to the Conversion of the Jews!' And is it possible, he pursues, after a moment's pause, to leave your money to a cause that doesn't exist?

Daniel, who has been lying awake for most of the night, tossing in his flat tight sheets, watching the red digital clock flick soundlessly onwards, has his answer. ‘Yes,' he says with neat precision. ‘Yes, it is. Bernard Shaw left his to a new alphabet, remember. And Old Hutch Hutchinson of Derby left his to found the London School of Economics. Shaw's will was successfully challenged, but the LSE is there all right. It was cobbled together by the trustees over a breakfast party near Godalming, if I remember rightly.'

‘But come off it,' says Nathan. ‘The Just Society! What a freak idea! Now if she'd wanted to found a Society for the Promotion of Social Justice, that would have been different.
Everybody
says they believe in Social Justice. The words mean nothing. But the Just Society? Whoever heard of such a thing?'

Daniel is not sure if this is helpful, but it is smart. The wording is indeed such that it would be hard to sanction any monies being handed over on its terms by David D'Anger to the Labour Party or any other known organization. Can David himself know what is meant by the Just Society? Is it some agreement between David and Frieda? Had they cooked this up together? (Daniel dimly remembers that there had been some bending of the terms in the Hutchinson-LSE case–hadn't Hutch originally left nothing to his family, and everything to the cause of Socialism? Was it Sidney Webb who had sorted that one out to everyone's satisfaction? Or was it that unworldly lunatic Shaw again?)

Nathan, on the end of the line by the Thames, is now wide awake, and is beginning to take a keener interest in the philosophical and legal conundrum which Daniel has sprung upon him. He unhelpfully reminds Daniel that the Ethical Society and the National Secular Society and the Philosophical Society and the British Humanists and even the Gay British Humanists are all
bona fide
organizations, probably even charitable organizations, to which one could legally leave one's entire fortune, though it is hard to know how ethics or secularism or philosophy or humanism would benefit from such a bequest. And is justice a concept more vague, more immaterial than ethics or humanism? It would be odd if it were, says Nathan. How would one set about founding a Just Society, Nathan begins to speculate–would it be a society
for
justice, or a society to
discuss
justice, or a society that
practised
justice? Had Frieda's will spelt any of this out? Perhaps the Just Society could spend its time playing variations on the Veil of Ignorance? How had Sidney Webb got the London School of Economics off the ground? How had he got from a breakfast party at Godalming to bricks and mortar in the Aldwych?

‘By lectures,' says Daniel tersely. He is beginning to regret interesting Nathan in this topic. ‘He set up courses of lectures.'

‘Well, there you are, there's your answer. Frieda's money could all be spent on lectures on social justice. Or on social justice research projects. I bet they cost a pretty penny.'

‘I can't think that was quite what she had in mind,' says Daniel.

‘Anyway, whatever she had in mind, she seems to have thought better of it,' says Nathan. ‘She decided to give it all to Benjamin instead.'

Daniel's breakfast has arrived, on a tray. He pours himself a cup of coffee, his mind beginning to meander from Frieda's wills to his river case.

‘It sounds to me', says Nathan, ‘as though we'd better let Benjie scoop the jackpot. With as good a grace as we can muster. I'm going to buy myself a bonanza break of lottery tickets today. Do you play the lottery, Daniel?'

‘Certainly not,' says Daniel with austerity.

‘Well, keep me briefed,' says Nathan.

Daniel rings off. Daniel eats his cooling eggs.

Daniel, it should be understood, is a man of probity. He is, if you like, a Just Man. But his is the justice of the law. He is a man of the law. He dislikes muddles. In part of his mind he knows that it is unlikely that David D'Anger had suborned Frieda Haxby in the hope of personal gain. Nevertheless, he will never trust David D'Anger or his sister Gogo again. They are contaminated by his mother's caprice.

His river case has disclosed a startling amount of contamination and corruption. Pollution, greed and dirty money have been flowing through four counties. Infection has run downstream, killing fish and decency, gathering momentum, until it flowed into the dirty sea. There have been lies, there have been legal evasions and tax evasions. There have been gestures and posturings. One of the alleged polluters has been seen recently on television, dashing down a clear tumbler of water taken from the River Wash as it flows through the backyard of one of his factories. ‘The champagne of Staffordshire!' he had declared to the camera. Daniel does not like this kind of posturing, which has become so popular in the television age. It has corrupted us all. It had even corrupted the austere Frieda. For what had Timon's feast been but a gesture without cameras, borrowed from the minister who fed his daughter on hamburgers for the entertainment of the nation?

Daniel drinks his metallic orange juice, and takes himself to the bathroom to shave. As he gazes at himself in the mirror he wonders if he is beginning to resemble his father.

Had Frieda committed suicide, and if so, what was the law relating to the estate of suicides? Daniel does not believe that Will Paine pushed Frieda off a cliff, but he thinks it possible that Frieda may have jumped. Death by misadventure, the inquest had concluded, but what if Frieda had known herself to be fatally ill? Might she not well have jumped? Daniel has now had time to study the letter that Frieda had received from the National Radiological Protection Board at Didcot, and has discovered that the radon level at Ashcombe, calculated at 850 Bq m-3, is way above the national average of 20 Bq m-3 and way above the danger level of 200. Her house had been full of Radon's daughters. No wonder the NRPB had urged action. The DoE pamphlet had also stressed that ‘cigarette smoking, which is the dominant cause of lung cancer, aggravates the risk of lung cancer from radon exposure'. Frieda had taken up smoking, she had lost weight, she had developed a cough. Had she therefore jumped into the sea? Such a leap would have been in character. She had a habit of taking precipitate action, of meeting trouble before it met her.

Daniel has not disclosed the radon information to anybody. The letter had stated that it was confidential, and would not be disclosed to anyone else without written permission. Nevertheless, the legal implications had sprung to Daniel's mind as soon as he had seen the label on the Jiffy bag, and the last sentence of the letter confirms his suspicions. It had instructed Frieda that tenants, landlords and owner-occupiers of radon-infected dwellings should consult p. 4 of the
Guide.
This stated that an owner-occupier had no legal obligation to disclose the results to anyone, but that such a person ‘should take advice about contractual matters'.

Daniel decides not to disclose anything to anybody. Or not yet.

Who would wish to buy Ashcombe, with or without its radon?

***

If Gogo D'Anger had shivered at the news of Frieda's second will, the Goltho & Goltho will which left all to Benjie, David D'Anger is struck with horror and guilt at the news of the first, which had left so much to The Just. For he has been directly responsible for this madness. Innocent of intent, as he himself and he alone knows, but nevertheless responsible. The perils of conversation, the dangers of philosophy, the pitfalls of speculation! Many hours over the years he had spent in discussion with Frieda Haxby, but it had never occurred to him that she took his ideas seriously. He had assumed it was all a game. She had never seemed to condone his interests. Indeed, she had mocked them, had made fun of them. And now she had called his bluff. She had asked him to press the button. At least, to be fair, she had thought of asking him to press the button. And then she had given him up and thought better of it. She had given him up, as he now gives up himself. But with what disastrous consequences! He had so prided himself on his Palmer alliance, he had cherished his friendly relations. But Frieda Haxby had sown perpetual dissension like dragon's teeth. She had set her family at war.

He replays his encounters with Frieda, and she appears before him in her protean forms. Girlish in Indian print, as she walked down the towpath past the houseboats near Nuffield in Oxford, on the day that he and Gogo had announced their plans to marry. (She had taken a piece of bread from her large bag to feed the ducks.) Stout in green silk at his wedding in the gardens of Gladwyn, champagne in hand, holding court to dons and divines and assembled D'Angers from three continents. Eating a plateful of spaghetti in their Highbury flat, and holding the infant Benjamin in her arms as she uttered prophecies over him. Appearing with David himself and an MEP and a Minister of Agriculture on a programme about British sugar production. Accompanying David and the Minister round the sugar factory at Scalethwaite, inspecting steel silos amidst the fetid smell of cooking beet. Celebrating her sixtieth birthday at a large party at the Conservatory at the Barbican amidst tropical plants and orchids–the nearest I could get to Guyana, she had joked.

At Timon's feast in Romley. In her tea-gown at Ashcombe.

And now, most vividly, most ominously returns to him the memory of another meeting. She appears to him as she had appeared on that ill-fated night three years ago–three years, four years, five years ago?–in Toronto. He had not even known she was in Canada, let alone in the same building, and had been startled to see his mother-in-law emerge from the make-up room of the space-age television studio where he was waiting to take part in a live TV phone-in on communitarianism and multiculturalism in Quebec and the UK. There she was, Frieda Haxby herself, curiously highly coloured, her grey hair puffed by eager fingers into a great crest. She had greeted him with a screech of delight, and informed him that she herself was to speak about the sensational discovery of the Swansberg Stone, an archaeological find which, if its runes proved authentic, would push back the date of Viking settlement in North America by some hundred years. She was as proud of this stone as if she had discovered it herself, as if she had been one of the first Viking seafarers to cross the Atlantic. And she was proud too of her glamorous son-in-law. How pleased they had been to see one another, amongst the alien crowd!

Though David, as he explained to Frieda in the back of a Beck cab on their way to the Harborfront Hotel where both were staying, did not find Toronto alien. It allowed for him, as it allowed for the many. David D'Anger admired Toronto and Trudeau. Toronto had received over the decades Vikings and Vietnamese, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Italians and Indians, and had made them all welcome. Toronto was a young city, it had no old age, no middle ages. It had made its own contracts. How fortunate, to start so late in history, without the baggage of Britain. So they had mused, as they sat drinking in a slowly revolving bar high above the bright lights, the lake, the islands. They had talked of post-colonialism, of Guyana, of vanished empires, of rising empires, of the Pax Americana. They had talked, alas, too much, of too many things–of communism and perpetual revolution, of socialism in one country, of Stalin and Trotsky, of Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, of Coleridge and Pantisocracy, of the slow death of the vision of the just. Oh, it lingers on, David had said, this vision, artificially protected by university grants in departments of political theory, but nobody believes in it any more. Capitalism and the free market had triumphed. Only a poet or a fool or a philosopher would speak of justice now.

The bar revolved very, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, as they drank their way through the night. And Frieda had probed him about new theories of social contract, about the possibility or impossibility of conceiving of a society as a closed system isolated from all other societies. Could one set up a just state in isolation? And could it survive? How quickly would it deteriorate? Would human nature itself change if society were changed from the roots? Could one eradicate the motive of greed? And is envy, as some philosophers have argued, an unnatural by-product of inequality? Or is it innate? And if innate, is it useful?

Frieda had been taken by the idea of an experimental society, as others had been before her. You'd need time, she had concluded, in order to see it work through the generations. Time, and an isolated location. Guyana, she pointed out, would do well. Surely Professor Challenger could have discovered the Just Society up the Oronoque, instead of the dinosaurs? Wouldn't David himself like to have a crack at it? This she had asked him, on top of the Harborfront Hotel, after a third of a bottle of Scotch, and he had said yes. Who would have thought that this conversation, and that fatal phrase, would have lodged in Frieda's maverick imagination? Whyever had he told her about the Sixth Form Society he had founded at school, of his attempts to re-establish it at Oxford! It had only been a talking club, a discussion group, a game. They hadn't meant to
do
anything. Had they? How could she have even thought of leaving money to the Just Society? As soon finance yet another expedition to raise the
Titanic,
or to dive for pirate gold amongst the hammer-headed sharks of Cocos Island!