The Witch of Exmoor (7 page)

‘Sit yourselves,' she said.

There was a placement, a label by each plate.

They sat. She sat. They watched her.

Ceremoniously, slowly, with dignity, she raised the lid from her plate. In unison, they imitated her action. Round the table, seven metal covers were lifted. They stared, amazed.

On seven large white gold-rimmed plates reposed what looked like small, shrivelled beefburgers. On the eighth plate, in front of David D'Anger, was a small round display of bright green peas. Nothing more, nothing less.

To laugh, to cry, to eat? They paused. Frieda paused. Never had the etiquette of following one's hostess's lead seemed more relevant.

She pitied them, reprieved them for a moment.

‘A glass of wine?' she asked.

A ripple of relief ran through them, as Daniel leapt up to help, surreptitiously inspected the label, lifted the alas already lifted cork. He poured a little of the dark red into each glass. Two more bottles stood on the side. (Do they need a poison-tester, or will she drink herself?)

Frieda picked up her fork. They picked up their forks. She put hers down again. And so did they.

‘Now,' she said in pity, ‘I'll tell you what you have before you. And you can eat it if you wish. If not, you may proceed to the next course.'

She rummaged in the large black bag hung from her chair arm, produced a piece of paper, put on her spectacles. She cleared her throat and announced, ‘What you have before you are Butler's Bumperburgers. And here is a description of what they contain.' She adjusted her spectacles, began to read. ‘The makers of Butler's Bumperburgers were fined £2,000 after trading standards officials in Somerset found the product contained no meat. Hot Snax of Middleton, West Yorkshire, admitted false labelling of the burgers, which were made of gristle, fat, chicken scraps, and water from cows' heads.'

A silence fell. Gogo recovered first, as she smartly put the cloche back over her plate. ‘Lucky
you,
David,' she said, eyeing his supernaturally green peas.

‘I'm not so sure,' said David. ‘I'm not so sure at all.' He prodded a pea, pierced it and pointed it in interrogation at Frieda.

Frieda looked approving. ‘Clever boy, David,' she said. ‘Quite right.'

‘But what', asked Daniel, ‘can you do to a pea?'

‘Sell-by date?' suggested Nathan quickly.

‘Clever boy, Nathan,' said Frieda. ‘But worse than that, worse than that. These peas were frozen long, long before the concept of sell-by date had been dreamt up. God knows how old they are, but certainly pre-1978, I've been assured.'

‘Still,' murmured Gogo, ‘all the same, I'd rather have the peas than these things. Given the choice.'

‘Say it again,' said Nathan, entering with a professional curiosity into the spirit of the occasion. ‘Water from the cows' heads, did you say?'

Rosemary left the table and went off to retch in the downstairs cloakroom, and simultaneously Frieda rose to her feet and started to clear the plates, scraping the brown wrinkled matted fibrous discs into a plastic bag. Conversation broke out, glasses were raised, cries of, ‘What's this wine, Frieda? What vintage?' were well fielded by Frieda, as she snatched David's peas from him, but not before he had defiantly, with bravado, eaten at least three. The demonstration was over, and Frieda disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a large dish of macaroni cheese and a bowl of salad. ‘Clean plates, I think?' she said, as she took a new pile of the old chipped set from the dresser and began to serve. The macaroni cheese looked delicious. They set about it with gratitude, with cries of appreciation and relief, as they began to ply Frieda with questions about her performance–whom was she testing, and how, and why, and where she had managed to get hold of those beefless burgers, those antique peas? Why had she done this thing to them? Was it, they now dared to ask, an attack upon poor Cedric, upon the government? Had she become a vegetarian? Was she joining an animal rights campaign?

Frieda dished out, sat down, tucked in, refilled glasses. ‘Look,' she said eventually, when she had their calmer attention. ‘I wanted to give you all a meal to remember. It's our last supper. Our last supper in this house. I've got rid of it. I'm off.'

Where to, they wanted to know, and she told them. To the sea's edge. To the end of the road. They must come and claim what they wanted, before she got the house-clearance men in. There were still old toys, old school reports, old textbooks from Romley Grammar School upstairs. They must make a date.

The move had been coming up on her for a long time, she said. She had grown to hate London. She had come to hate the human race. What was the point of it? ‘I resign,' said Frieda, telling her amber beads as though they were a rosary. ‘I leave it all to you. To you, Cedric, and to you, David, I leave the politics. You can divide it equally. That's fair. I leave justice to Daniel, who will surely be made a judge soon. Judges get younger every day. I leave education to Patsy, and the arts to Rosemary, and the free market to Nathan, and the health service to Gogo. That just about covers the lot. I've had enough.'

And they saw that although she now smiled and fed them clean food from a large dish, she had gone mad.

Over pudding–a large, unsuspicious nursery apple-crumble–she elaborated. They had heard the story of how she had tried to get rid of the car? They hadn't even let her get rid of it. She was chained to it. Why bother with cars, with roads, with going from place to place? It had all gone wrong. She would remove herself. Urban life was poisonous. The air was impure, the foodstuffs were contaminated. Madness had fallen on the land and she had caught it. People could no longer tell the good from the bad. You only had to look around to see that they were suffering from a terminal disease. They crowded together to die, like a species intent on extinction. Pallid, shuffling, talking to themselves, crazy. Even when they thought they were having fun–and she pronounced the word ‘fun' with impressive venom–they were stoking themselves with misery. She had walked through that dreadful little open air piazza in Covent Garden the other day and she had seen people sitting at tables eating food that was garbage. She had seen mould growing on a slice of wet giant quiche. She had smelt vomit, and had then discovered that what she smelt was not vomit but burger and pizza. People were eating food that smelt of hot vomit (sorry, Rosemary, are you feeling better now?), of regurgitated vomit. Like biblical dogs, they ate. She had pursued the burger story, spotted in a tiny four-line news item in the
Independent,
and had taken herself to abattoirs in Middleton and Somerset. She had seen the light. And while in Somerset she had bought a castle by the sea. She had walked into an estate agent's and bought it. And there, alone, she would moulder.

Triumphantly, she lit another carcinogenic cigarette.

‘And you think', inquired Rosemary, ‘that you will find the countryside full of pure, clean-living, ecologically correct people? It isn't, you know. It's full of burgers too. Even fuller of burgers than Covent Garden.'

‘That's as may be,' said Frieda. ‘There must be bits that are empty still.'

There was no reasoning with her, they could see. Meekly, they drank their coffee and made their farewells.

 

Outside on the pavement, Daniel Palmer had attempted a word of man-to-man worldly deprecation to Cedric Summerson. After all, the woman was his mother, and Summerson was a minister. A bad mother, and a bad minister, but the courtesies must be observed even
in extremis.
‘Bit of a Timon's feast, eh?' said Daniel, pressing the little battery of his car alarm. His car winked back at him.

Summerson took it like a man. ‘Impressive woman, your mother,' he said, with a not very successful attempt at a twinkle. They shook hands on it.

Summerson walked down the road to his own car. Although he did not know who Timon was, and was never to discover, he knew quite well why he had been summoned. It was her revenge. He hoped the others did not know. He suspected they did not. Clever they might be, but innocent, he guessed. High-minded, ambitious middle-class innocents–except, perhaps, for Nathan. But Nathan had shown no sign of recognition when the words ‘Hot Snax' had been mentioned. Nathan had probably never represented any product as downmarket, as obscurely and deviously provided, as
cheap,
as Hot Snax. Nathan was more a Safeway, a Sainsbury man. The trail was not clear. However had Frieda followed it? She was dangerous, as well as impressive. Just as well that she was about to remove herself from society. Just as well that she would, in a court of law, appear as mad as a meat axe. Her testimony was worthless.

 

Daniel and Patsy had talked of Frieda's craziness as they drove home that night. So did Rosemary and Nathan. But David talked of social justice, while Gogo drove and listened. Those three peas, he knew, had infected him, as Frieda had intended that they should. He would never expel their message from his system. Like the princess on her twenty mattresses, he would be tormented. He was susceptible. Frieda had known this, and she had chosen to offer him this torment. He would not reject it.

‘In his
Utopia,'
said David relentlessly,as Gogo drove down the Balls Pond Road at midnight, ‘More proposed that butchers should be recruited, as a punishment, from the criminal classes. You would not expect a good man to become a butcher. Fourier went one further and proposed that all unattractive jobs–all jobs that nobody in their right mind would do without constraint–should be simply abandoned. Society would readjust, he argued. Readjust and do without. Kendrick goes one further still and argues that with any fair system of job allocation any society would choose to be vegetarian. No more abattoirs, no more chicken gutters, no more beefburgers, no more cows' heads. Bernard Shaw said we could live on pills and air.'

‘Shaw was fastidious,' said Gogo. ‘Like you. Like, it would seem, the reincarnate Frieda.'

‘I suppose', said David, ‘that I'll have to go and visit an abattoir. She was pointing at one in my constituency, I assume.'

‘There's no need to be so competitive,' said Gogo, although she knew there was.

‘It's not as though I can't imagine what's behind the curtain,' said David. ‘I know what's there. That's why I don't eat meat anyway.' ‘Nobody was accusing you,' said Gogo.

‘I accuse myself,' said David.

‘My dear David', said Gogo, ‘you should never have left the courts of theory. Now you must enter the dirty world. And what of the sewers, what of the untouchables?'

David put his hand on Gogo's knees. She pressed it. They were set upon a disastrous course, and, like a good wife, a good politician's wife, she would try to stand by her man. He would betray her again and again, not with a call girl or an actress or a pretty PA (though who knows, perhaps with them as well, for with his looks how could he not fall into temptation?)–no, he would betray her for Social Justice, that blind blood-boltered maiden.

David D'Anger is haunted by the fair vision of a just society. She smiles at him. Is this possible, you ask, in the late twentieth century? We concede it was possible for men and women to create, even to believe in such images in the past–as late as the nineteenth century these possibilities lingered–but surely we know better now? We are adult now, and have put away childish things. Dreams survive in academe, at conferences and congresses where students and lecturers and professors still discuss the concept of the fair, the just and the good. But they have no connection with a world of ring-roads and beefburgers, with a world of disease and survival.

Imagine David D'Anger. You say he is an impossibility, and you cannot imagine him, any more than he can imagine the nature of the revolution which would bring about the world he thinks he wishes to construct. But you are wrong. The truth is that you, for David D'Anger, are the impossibility. The present world which we seem to inhabit is an impossibility. He cannot live at ease in it, he cannot believe it is real. He believes that the other world is possible. He has left the abstract world of reason and entered the public forum. He has hope. He has ambition, but he also has hope. Look at him carefully. Look at him at Timon's feast in abandoned Romley, in Romley left to its own decay. Look at him a year and a half later at that more palatable meal in preserved and enduring Hampshire. At Frieda's prompting he has made good use of the intervening time.

At the age of seventeen, in Guyana, at school in distant Georgetown, David D'Anger read Plato and Aristotle. They blew his mind. Into the hinterland of thought he travelled, to Eldorado. Along rivers, past strange birds, carmine, azure, emerald. Mother of Gold, Scum of Gold. He read Sir Walter Ralegh and dreamt strange dreams. The Guyanese are the chosen people of the Caribbean, and David D'Anger thought himself their chosen son. East and West meet in Guyana, they meet in David D'Anger. Rivers, waterfalls, great iridescent fish. Greeks, Phoenecians, Egyptians. At seventeen he possessed the globe.

To know the good is to choose it. This is what he learnt. This became clear to him as a boy and it is clear to him now. He would push the button, he would countenance earthquakes. He would rip away the veil from the temple and force us to choose the good. You know such men are dangerous. He knows that an absence of such men is dangerous.

David D'Anger is headstrong and he believes in himself and his agenda. His certainties have survived every success, and he has been successful. If he suffers from
folie de grandeur,
he has found others who will collude in his folly. Scholar of the year in Georgetown, he was sent to the old country, to study at Oxford. His family, exiled by Burnham, assembled around him. At Oxford he rose, and he continues to rise. He is courted by institutions at home and abroad. Sugar Daddy America and his tin-nippled hard-coiffed Mother Country have both tried to entrap him. Even the many-teated sow of Europe has grunted her overtures. For David D'Anger is a man for whom the time is right. Handsome, clever and black, he is political plausibility personified. His name helps to legitimate many a committee, his presence sanctions many a conference. He can hardly fail to know his worth. Scholarships, fellowships, awards, graces and favours have been dangled before him. Study-centres in grand palazzi on Italian lakes have beckoned him, and so have residencies in distinguished American colleges. (Perhaps there are not yet
quite
enough clever handsome correct black men to go round?) Even poor Guyana has asked him to return, although she knows she cannot afford him. Choice, whatever Nathan Herz may think, seems to glitter before David with a refracted kaleidoscopic brilliance that would blind a less certain man. But David D'Anger has no intention of being bought or blinded. He thinks he knows where he is going. And if at times there seems to be an ill fit between his grandiose dreams of justice and the bathos of finding himself adopted as a parliamentary candidate for the marginal seat of Middleton in West Yorkshire–well, he tells himself, he is young yet, and uncompromised. He will force a fusion. Everything is going for him. He cannot fail.