The Witch of Exmoor (33 page)

There is plenty of weed in Jamaica. You can smell it on the hot air day and night. But Will does not feel at home on this dangerous island. He wants a respectable life. Here he drifts and wanders. He is afraid. He cannot make judgements here. At least in England he had known how to avoid being at the bottom of the heap. Here he does not know what the heap is made of, or where its bottom may he. He remembers prison scare stories about yardies, about the Jamaicans on Death Row. There is still a death penalty, here in Jamaica. The Queen of England, shame on her, must sign the death warrants. At least he is more free than the Queen.

He dares not surface yet. He sews some of Frieda's cash into his jacket lining. He is surprised that nobody has caught up with him, for he had travelled on his own papers. Perhaps he has not yet been identified. Perhaps Patsy Palmer and Daniel have kept what they know to themselves.

He wonders how Simon Palmer fares. He himself is not in an enviable position, but he would not change places with Simon Palmer.

Will Paine is lonely. He would like a friend, but he does not know who he can trust.

It is easier to get out of England than to get back in again. This he knows.

 

‘I wonder,' wrote the young Charles Dickens, when contemplating emigration as a proper response to an incoming Tory government, ‘I wonder, if I went to a new colony with my head, hands, legs and health, I should force myself to the top of the social milk-pot and live upon the cream! ... Upon my word I believe I should.'

 

Gogo D'Anger has never had much time for therapists and analysts, for witch doctors, shrinks and counsellors, though she has friends who wear these labels. She calls herself a physician, and has tended to regard those meddling with the mind and the psyche as amateurs. Even psychology and psychiatry she treats with suspicion. But now, like many before her, she is humbled, and forced to seek for help. Benjamin, it is clear, is suffering from some form of depression. Is it endogenous or reactive, and does it matter which it is? Is it wise to put a boy of his age on psychoactive drugs, and is there any alternative? And if dru gs, which drugs? Benjamin has never been manic, as far as his parents know, but maybe even they have not observed him very closely? David and Gogo ask around, and discover to their surprise that half their friends, for no very obvious reasons, are on Prozac. They are of the Prozac generation without knowing it. But nobody has any clear advice about the medication of the very young.

Neither of them likes the idea of their boy swallowing substances. Substances may poison him for life. There must be some other way to reach him. Since the incident in the bath, they have watched him day and night. He has promised, wearily, that he will not try holding his breath under water any more, but can they trust him?

Gertrude Cohen had been a friend of Frieda Haxby's, but that does not necessarily disqualify her from being the wisest woman in Europe. She responds to their appeal, and comes round to see them, although she says she is now old and retired. She is like a caricature of what such a woman might be imagined to be. One of the most eminent of the 1930s refugee generation, she has written several books on child development, on child psychology and on child psychotherapy. Her accent is guttural, her eyes fierce, her hair grey and wiry and wild. She stares at them through spectacles tethered to her bosom by a gold pin and a gold chain. She had opened her career with a study of separation, loss and survivor guilt, and in later years had specialized in adolescent depression and–though they do not mention this–adolescent death. She had worked with the terminally ill child, wiith the suicidal child. She has been into the caverns of the mind. She has seen grief and torment. There she sits, drinking China tea with lemon, a wise woman who has been into the underworld and led others up to the light of day. They gaze at this old woman, whom normally they would I fear have regarded in benign and superior amusement. They gaze at her in a mixture of awe and hope. They throw themselves upon her mercy.

Gertrude Cohen listens patiently, a withered sybil. She has heard all the stories of all the world before. All parents think their child the brightest and the best of the sons of the morning. David D'Anger and Grace D'Anger are Everyman and Everywoman. They tell the strange tale of Frieda's wills, and here Gertrude Cohen shows them the favour of looking more than usually alert–for this is a variation, she concedes. Frieda had been an original. Gertrude Cohen looks at Frieda's daughter Grace with a glimmering of professional respect, as though acknowledging that Gogo had done well to stay alive and gain qualifications and get married and hold down a decent job. Gertrude Cohen accepts another Marie biscuit, which she nibbles with her evenly white false front teeth.

Then Gertrude Cohen plunges them into gloom by declaring that she is far too old to practise. It would be wrong for her even to set eyes on Benjamin. But she is sure they were right to refer the case to her. (They brighten, like good students praised in class.) She would like to recommend that they take Benjamin to see a colleague of hers, now practising at the Jameson Clinic. This colleague would be a most suitable person, in her view, to interview Benjamin. Of course, she cannot speak for her colleague, as her colleague is much in demand and may not be able to take on any more cases at the moment, and they will appreciate that even in the event of an acceptance the treatment may be long. (It will also, she implies, be costly, though she does not spell this out.)

David and Gogo nod, meekly, gratefully. They wait for the magic name of the designate, the successor. Gertrude Cohen inscribes it on a page of a notebook, which she tears out and hands to them. It reads

 

Lily McNab
18 Dresden Road
Maida Vale
London
NW
8

 

Miss Cohen has also given them a phone number, and the address of the clinic, which is in St John's Wood.

David and Gogo stare at this scrap of paper with an unjustifiable degree of faith and expectation. The very name of Lily McNab reassures them. They thank Gertrude Cohen profusely, and ask if they can ring her a cab. Not at all, she says, quite tardy. She is quite capable of walking to the station. Can David drive her to the station, they ask. Certainly not, she says. Exercise is good for me, she says, and
off
she marches to Highbury and Islington, on the stick-like and slightly bandy legs that have walked her into Dachau and out of it, that have walked her into the night and out of the night and now will walk her unbowed into the vale.

David does not believe in private medicine. Gogo does not believe in psychoanalysis. But they both believe in Lily McNab. They have no choice.

 

Before we meet Lily McNab, let us return, briefly, to the Herz household by the river. We suspect all is not well with the Herzes. Jessica and Jon are fine, and we don't have to worry about them: let's say that they are lucky in their choice of genes on the Herz side, and although they have inherited the Palmer colouring they have also received a fair amount of natural optimism and gregariousness from their Golders Green gran. They have been only mildly affected by the expurgated news of Benjie's illness, for they had sensed he was growing out of them anyway. It's a pity, but that's how it is. They have not been told about their mother's condition, and they have not guessed that there is anything wrong with her, for they are accustomed to her short temper, her vagaries, her busyness, her exhaustions, her absences. They are enjoying the relaxed reign of a particularly amusing non-live-in paid minder called Chantal, who collects them from school, cooks their suppers, takes them to the movies. Chantal is a laugh. She lets them stay up all hours while she chats on the phone to her boyfriend in Beirut. We can forget about Jess and Jon. As Chantal herself, unmindful of their fate, so often does.

Rosemary demands a little more of our attention, for her situation is more complicated and more developed. Although she feels no physical effects from her medical condition, her mental unease increases, for it is clear that her suspicions have been correct. There
is
something wrong with her kidneys. Is it serious? The specialist will not commit himself, he hedges his bets. He annoys Rosemary by returning once more to the subject of her ancestry. He seems to wish to insist that she has inherited degenerate kidneys. As Rosemary's mother's kidneys have by now been eaten by the mackerel and the dogfish of the Atlantic, there is no way of inspecting them for clues, and Rosemary is obliged to state quite bluntly that she cannot inform Mr Saunders of the cause of the death of her father, Andrew Palmer. Indeed she cannot confirm that he is dead. And she has no intention of digging around in the family gene cemetery for the kidneys of her grandparents. The Palmers, she bluffs, had been military men, and a lot of them had died of malaria and dysentery and alcohol in India. Smart diseases, positional complaints. The Haxbys had gone in, less smartly, for strokes. He can make of that what he will. It is up to him to sort this out. That is what he is paid for.

Mr Saunders finds her a tricky and unsympathetic customer. He could almost prefer the days when patients were patients. He'd been paid nearly as much, in the good old pre-market days, and he'd been treated with a lot more respect. Respect is worth something. Respect is a positional good.

Rosemary wonders whether to confide her fears to Nathan, as most wives would. But she is not most wives. And Nathan is in unreceptive mood. His position in the firm is embattled, and he is abstracted. He and his team seem quite unable to come up with anything brilliant or new on the Health Marketing Plan. It is all cliche, all pastiche. He wonders whether it would be possible to break out completely, to think the unthinkable, to start marketing not by reassurance and innuendo but by full frontal fear? A Black Campaign? Skeletons, diseased organs, skulls, scare stories? Or what about extending the lottery to spare parts, kidney machines, fertility treatment, hip replacement? He tries this out on Rosemary, who is usually receptive to his darker jokes, but she seems curiously unamused. In vain does he insist that we all know quite well that it's done by lottery anyway, and has been, discreetly, for decades: she's been strongly in favour of the lottery money for the arts, so why should she disapprove of Bangladeshi kidneys by lottery? She makes it clear that she does not wish to continue this conversation. He can't see why she's being so squeamish, and is not in a position to guess that she is wondering if she has been correctly advised that no private insurance on earth would cover the cost of long-term renal dialysis. She has not yet had the courage to inspect the small print of her own policy. And no, she does not agree with Nathan that we will, by the end of the century, solve the health service crisis by introducing legalized euthanasia. Demographically, it's a cert, insists Nathan. It's got to come, so why not go for it now? But Rosemary won't listen, and neither will the punters or the electorate. Purgatorial flames are already big business, argues Nathan. The American way of death. Forest Lawns. Oh, shut up, says Rosemary pettishly, feeling her pulse flutter.

And Nathan himself can't find much consolation in these fantasies. Can he be losing faith in the market?

Nathan loves the lottery, he is a heavy investor in scratch cards and lottery tickets, he doesn't think much of the dull puritanism of Daniel and Patsy Palmer, of David and Gogo D'Anger, who disapprove of the whole damn thing. But he doesn't think his number is going to come up. So far he's only made twenty-five quid back, and he's spent hundreds. What he'd said to Daniel, about his pressing need for
£20,000,
had been less than the truth. He needs more than twenty, he needs a hundred grand. Nathan Herz is in trouble. He has forgotten to charge a client, for a bill of
£120,000;
a year has passed, and now he dare not send in the bill, he dare not own up to his colleagues. He's not been a criminal: just bloody stupid. He has been lying awake at nights with worry, listening to the lap of the Thames. He is getting stale. He is making mistakes. He hears whispering behind closed doors. Rosemary thinks she is for the axe, and Nathan is beginning to think he is for the high jump: from being a two-income, high-earning, upwardly mobile family, they are about to become a no-income, on the skids, debt-ridden casualty. Can this be so?

And Nathan is beginning to think he had never been a real achiever. (He is too subtle, too clever, he tries to console himself.) That summer he and Rosemary had been guests on a week's cruise of the Turkish Aegean, invited by the richest of the rich. Fabulous money, unimaginable money. Nathan had been unnerved, unsettled, and so had Rosemary, though she had tried not to show it. They had been invited by Greta and Bob Eagleburger, patrons of the arts, friends of Rosemary's. Greta painted on Sundays, Bob bought. Theirs was the yacht, theirs were the Braques and the Dufys and the Hockneys that hung on the walls of this floating emblem of good taste. For the Eagleburgers had an eye, they had bought well. Bob Eagleburger had an eye for Rosemary, but Nathan could tolerate that: it was the
grand luxe
that pissed him off.
Luxe, calme et volupté.
Servants, champagnes, diamonds. And a fucking Turner, a real Turner, in the Circe Lounge. Generous, were the Eagleburgers, to their little crew of sponging impressionable guests: generous, and mean with it, for they sometimes made them sing for their suppers. The rich are like that. They can make demands. The Herzes and the Spensers had sung to their tune. Even Harry Danzig, lord of unnumbered acres of barren Scottish moorland, had jumped at their bidding. Lord Danzig's demeanour was impenetrably civil and servile, as he accepted Eagleburger largesse, as he toiled round ruins and tinkled old dance tunes on the piano and entertained with indiscreet tales of royalty. The Spensers had been less docile: once Nathan had caught a subversive smirk of astonished disbelief on Sandy Spenser's face at the appearance of yet another farfetched miracle of cuisine. But Sandy was a sculptor: he could afford to smirk. The Herzes could not. They had to toe the line.