The Witch of Exmoor (5 page)

When the case was over the family heaved a sigh of relief, and wondered what she would take up next. Bee-keeping, bicycling, or yet more litigation? Was she intent on squandering her money? What, they wondered, of their rightful inheritance? They were all doing nicely at the moment, but these days, with pensions so unreliable, the working life so short, the afterlife so long, the private care so expensive, the health service demolished–who could tell what costly interminable terminal care she or they or their grandchildren's grandchildren might need? Had she the
right
to go mad?

Possibly, speculated Gogo, Frieda's mind had been affected by her mother's death. Gladys Haxby, stout and static, had died five years ago–died where she had lived, at a good old age, in the little cottage in Chapel Street in Dry Bendish where Frieda had been born. There had been no love lost between Gladys and Frieda, and not much pretence of a warmth between Gladys and her three grandchildren. But Frieda had visited regularly, curiously and improbably dutiful, until the end, driving up and down the dual-carriageway, at least once every three months when she was in England. Why did she go? Because she was the only child. (There had been another daughter, but she had died long ago; and Frieda's father had died, of a stroke, in his fifties.) Maybe, suggested Gogo, over dinner in Islington, on the phone to her siblings, at table in Hampshire–maybe Gladys's death had tipped some balance in Frieda? Frieda had been a grim worker all her life, and she had been held in grim combat by Gladys. In Gladys's presence, Frieda was oddly subdued, reverting to a morbid attentive unwilling servitude that suggested what she had been like as a sulky, determined, ambitious child. Gladys Haxby had been a schoolmistress, and in her demanding and irksome company Frieda became once more a pupil, a listener, although she had nothing to learn and Gladys had nothing to say. Frieda, herself no mean talker, fell silent in her mother's presence, as Gladys talked and talked and talked, of nothing. Of herself, of nothing. An unchanging subjugation.

Then Gladys died, and Frieda was set free. This was Gogo's theory. It was the headiness of freedom in her sixties, the late liberation from the guilt of the tedious and armchair-bound old bloodsucker, that had sent her spinning off into space and seventeenth-century Sweden. It must have been on Gladys's death that Frieda had started her last disastrous literary enterprise. None of them had known what she was plotting, for she never talked about her work in advance; ever a solitary worker, she had hidden her typewriter from prying children's eyes, and in later years, when there were none to pry, she had become secretive–and, if questioned, obscure and misleading. She had, before publication, conceded that she had departed from her usual arena to write a historical novel–but that statement, surprising enough in itself, had prepared nobody for the vast, incoherent over-researched baroque monstrosity of her
Queen Christina.
Her children had found it almost embarrassingly unreadable (although Gogo declared it had some good passages), and the reviews had been appalled and appalling. How could Frieda Haxby, social analyst, prophet, sage and sybil, and author of that perennial and influential classic
The Matriarchy of War–
how could Frieda Haxby have written such tosh?

The critics were delighted, and outdid one another in insults. ‘Once seen as Britain's answer to Simone de Beauvoir, Frieda Haxby has revealed herself as the heir to Barbara Cartland,' declared one of the Sundays. ‘Long a symbol of the austere and high-minded rigidity of the postwar left, Miss Haxby's latest effort throws into doubt all that preceded it,' somewhat ungrammatically declared one of the organs of the New Right, under the heading
THE EMPRESS'S NEW CLOTHES
. ‘Senile ramblings,' posited an old-fashioned new literary review. The kindest comment suggested that Frieda, like George Eliot in
Romola,
had been bogged down by too much historical detail, and hoped (a little wanly, as though the last book the reviewer ever wanted to see arrive in a Jiffy bag was another work by Haxby) that she would soon return to her ‘spare, challenging and relevant interpretations of social organizations'.

Frieda seemed undisturbed by this, but how could one tell what she really felt? Patiently, she pointed out that although she had indeed had a long and interesting correspondence with de Beauvoir, she had never been a member of any political party, and had kept her distance from both left and right. She said that she entirely agreed with one critic who called
The Matriarchy of War
^n overrated and outdated thesis which did not deserve its reputation–she'd been in her twenties when she'd written it, and subsequent research into the topic of female employment during the World Wars had contradicted or at least qualified many of her earlier findings. It was a book for its time, and it wasn't her fault if people in later decades used it for their own purposes. And as for
Queen Christina
–well, she'd enjoyed writing it, and where was the harm in that? She could write about what she liked. Thus, reasonably, she replied to her interviewers. Her appearance of calm and unruffled detachment did nothing to pacify them. She seemed quite unaware of the nature of the atrocity she was alleged to have committed. She had betrayed nobody. If others had false expectations, if others had waited for answers that she could not or would not give–that was their problem, not hers. They had been misreading her all along.

At other moments, in other contexts, she appeared less reasonable. She suddenly threatened to sue a journalist who had described her as an ageing Peacenik and supporter of the Women of Greenham Common: hadn't he bothered to check that inside and outside the Labour Party she'd made herself very unpopular right through the fifties and sixties by supporting the nuclear deterrent and opposing unilateral disarmament? He'd clearly got no further than the tide of her first publication, which, far from proposing disarmament, had described the ways in which women had at least temporarily profited from the wartime economy, and which had regretted the way they'd let themselves be shoved back into peacetime underemployment. The journalist had apologized, in print, for his error, acknowledging that he had confused her track-record as warmonger with that of some of her eminent and more peace-loving contemporaries. She had dropped her threat: the swine wasn't worth contradicting, she decided. Or so she told David, who told Gogo, who told Daniel and Rosemary.

It was Patsy who heard the oddest commentary of all. Driving home late one night from London to Hampshire, about a fortnight after the publication of
Queen Christina,
Patsy had heard Frieda on the radio declaring to some spaced-out disc jockey that the idea of writing the novel had come to her ‘as I stood staring at the stone cross with runes near my ancestral home in Dry Bendish in Lincolnshire'. At that moment, as she laid her hand on the ancient monument, she told the young man, she had known that she was linked by blood to Queen Christina of Sweden–scholar, patron of the arts, lesbian, atheist, accomplice of assassins. ‘You mean a kind of reincarnation, kind of?' the disc jockey had asked: and to Patsy's surprise Frieda, instead of snapping his head off, had mildly agreed. ‘Yes, well, I suppose, kind of,' she had said. And had gone on to talk about the Vikings, and about her earlier research into the eighteenth-century iron trade of Sweden, and her voyage round the Swedish coast in the wake of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the honour done to her by the Swedish crown for her recovery of a little-known tract of Swedish history. The disc jockey hadn't been so interested in all this, Patsy could tell, but he'd let the old thing ramble. Mad indeed. Patsy had hesitated to tell Daniel and the other Palmers of this damning piece of evidence, but had been unable to resist. Queen Christina, crazy herself, had driven Frieda Haxby crazy.

It was some three months after the publication of this ill-starred work that Frieda had summoned her family to the Grim Feast in Romley. During these three months Frieda had been attacked by historians of the right and the left, by feminists, lesbians, gossip columnists and cartoonists, by Catholics, Protestants and humanists.
Christina
had managed to annoy just about everybody. Nobody seemed to have read it (for it
was
very long) but everybody knew it was no good, and that it had ruined Frieda Haxby's reputation as a social historian.

So Daniel and Patsy, Gogo and David, Rosemary and Nathan were not expecting a very happy evening when they were summoned to the Mausoleum, to the house that had been the childhood home of the three Palmers.

Let us return, with them, from Hampshire to Romley. A year and a half has passed since the gathering, though it has not faded from their minds.

 

There the old house still stood, shabby, stranded, archaic, fronting a stretch of municipal suburban greenery that had once been their playground, and which was now strewn with litter–plastic bags, sweet and crisp packets, beer cans, cola cans, and, no doubt, if one looked more closely, condoms and syringes. The tragedy of the commons. When they were small, Romley, though deeply dreary and unfashionable, had not been dangerous; but a wash of grief and misery had swept eastwards to it from Hackney and Leytonstone, as its more successful and forceful residents had pushed their way westwards against the tide to Stoke Newington and Highbury and Finsbury Park. Now Frieda's house stood like a beached, bow-fronted galleon fronting the trodden sour and muddy green. On either side houses had been demolished or converted into flatlets or maisonettes, first by the council, and now, since council spending had been suspended, by housing associations. Frieda's house alone stood as it had in the late 1940s when she and their father had bought it. It was a large, wide, late-Victorian, red brick house, four storeyed, with an air of some pretension: the slightly raised ground floor swelled into a curved and monumental frontage far grander than a suburban bay, with a hint of funerary or temple architecture that had prompted the building's pet name–an affectionate name, in its own way, a name bestowed in order to placate the Furies. The Mausoleum, with Frieda as priestess. The three of them did not know if they hated it or not. It was their place. Here they had huddled, and here they had, after their fashion, survived.

What were her plans for it now? Plans she had, they were certain, or they would not have been convened. It was not Christmas. And she had given up celebrating Christmas more than ten years ago. Last year she had flown off to Jamaica. Or so she had said. (Some said she had been seen over the New Year at the tables in Monte Carlo.)

Daniel and Patsy had met Rosemary and Nathan outside, on the pavement: Daniel had spotted Nathan parking his flash red sports car from afar, and had waited, to make a joint entry. They could see Gogo and David were there already, for there was David's sober Honda, by the cracking kerb. They greeted one another in the soft autumn light. Patsy was carrying a bunch of tightly budded lilies, their pods still green and unripe though faintly streaked with emergent orange: they wore a red triangular laminated label which, in anticipation of litigation, declared that their pollen could stain clothing. Rosemary clutched a bottle of champagne. Who knows, she said, as she pecked Patsy on the cheek, there may be something to celebrate? Who knows? And they had all paused on the pavement, looking up at the brooding building, where Frieda had incarcerated herself, and worked and worked and worked, night after night, for bread and butter and glory and the enlightenment of mankind. ‘You're right,' muttered Daniel to Nathan, as they ascended the short flight of badly cemented uneven, peeling steps to the front door, and congregated round the Victorian coalhole. ‘You're right. There's a plan for an extension to the motorway. Do you think she'll turn stubborn and refuse to budge?'

Nathan shrugged. With the new mad random Frieda, who could tell? She might decide to chain herself to a tree in protest, or she might offer to wield the axe herself.

Gogo answered the doorbell, with a look of warning on her face. They could hear Frieda and David deep in conversation, but there was also a third voice–whose could it be?

‘It's that Cedric chap,' whispered Gogo discouragingly. ‘God knows why he's here. He certainly doesn't, I can tell you.'

‘Cedric who?'

‘That politician chappie,' muttered Gogo, her back to the antlered hat-stand, where Nathan hung his umbrella. ‘You know, the one before last.'

A pageant of rejected lovers and admirers stretched back through their communal memory, in file, wringing their hands, grinning, sneering, flattering, soothing, blinking, each after his fashion. Portly ghosts, cadaverous suitors. Some had come in the old days with sweets for the children, some had tried to make themselves agreeable. Cedric had been too late in line to bother them, except as an embarrassment. For it is not pleasant to learn that one's mother is having a fling with a government minister, and a grotesque minister, of the wrong party, and of quite the wrong shape.

As we enter the room the contrast between David D'Anger and Cedric Summerson strikes forcibly. Both sit, politely alert, legs uncrossed, leaning slightly forward, on the edges of their broken-down easy-chairs (who knows what may lurk in their recesses, were one to relax and sit back?), both hold glasses of what looks like still water in their hands–Evian, no doubt, or Malvern. An abstemious couple, though Cedric Summerson's complexion does not boast of prolonged restraint. Both are suited and wear pale ties, but there the resemblance ends. Cedric Summerson is not exactly fat, but he is heavy–stout,jowled, red-faced, ponderous. The colour and texture of his skin are unattractive. It is mottled, pitted, veined, at once shiny and coarse. Good living has sent him off like an old ripe cheese. Runnels of decay thread his features. He is turning bad before one's eyes. How can Frieda ever have fancied this monster? Did she, ever, or was it all a rumour? And if it was a rumour, why is he here?