The Witch of Exmoor (8 page)

Does his wife Gogo believe in him? Probably. It is hard to tell what she thinks. She has not attempted to check his political ambitions, although she knows that the wives of Members of Parliament are not to be envied. She has her own life, her own career. She does not give much away. She seems to approve his position. She reads some of the books he reads, watches some of the programmes on which he appears. She picks up his references, as we have seen. What more is needed? She is English, she does not show emotion. If she loves both her husband and her son, obsessively, fearfully, you would never guess it. She is the most severe, the most Nordic of Frieda's offspring. She and David D'Anger make an unlikely, a striking couple, and they know it. David and Grace, the dark sun and the cold moon. One day, she says, she will travel up-country with him to Eldorado.

In his early days at Oxford, David had been pursued by men, as was to be expected. It was assumed that he would find it diplomatic to surrender. The Master of Gladwyn College himself, a well-known seducer and corrupter of youth, had courted David, and it was widely rumoured that David had succumbed, for the old boy's manner remained remarkably indulgent over a period of years. Small, vain, preposterous, button-eyed, pursy, plump, treble Sir Roy had petted young David: shaking lingering hands one night after a conversazione, he had murmured, ‘Such a turn on, dear boy, such a turn on!'–alluding, as David took it, to the conjunction of his own smooth dark skin with Sir Roy's pallid cloistral parchment. This had been at the end of David's first term. Three years later, having safely survived such favours, David D'Anger had announced his engagement, and old Sir Roy had graced his wedding to Grace ‘Gogo' Palmer–indeed he had generously held the wedding celebrations in the grounds of his own Lodge. During the course of the party he had pinched David's arm wistfully and patted his body most intimately: ‘Wisely done, my boy, wisely done,' he had squeaked, as he winked and peered with lubricious approval at the austerely suited bride, at the flowing jade-green robes of the bride's stout and eccentric and eminent mother. Had there been some secret pact? Had David D'Anger kissed the arse of the establishment? Nobody knew, or nobody would tell.

 

Fourteen years now have they been married, David and Gogo, and they have kept the secrets of their marriage bed. They present a united front. They have but the one child, and they will never have another. He is the pride of their life, the apple of their eye. He is a genius. He has inherited all the talent–and there is much–from both sides of his family. He is heir to great expectations.

Frieda Haxby had recognized his exceptional qualities at birth. Well, not quite at birth, for she had been in Canada when he was born, and she had not caught an early flight home to be with him. Benjamin was not her first grandchild, nor she a natural granny. Had Gogo resented the delay? If so, she never showed it. One could accuse Frieda of many failings, but not of preferring her first-born son Daniel to her two daughters. She treated all with equal inconsistency–scattering favours when it suited her, not when it suited the recipient. Until she saw Benjamin. And then things changed. Or so Gogo thought she noted.

Benjamin was six weeks old when Frieda finally made her way to the D'Angers' untidy basement flat in Highbury. Lying in Gogo's arms, he had stared at Frieda, with his large dark long-lashed seducer's eyes, and he had smiled at her, as charmingly as he had smiled at his Guyanese grandmother. And she had smiled at him. ‘The divine child,' she said. ‘Oh, the divine child.' And Gogo and David had smiled at one another proudly, for they too knew that he was the divine child, he was the darling saviour of the world. They had been amazed by the ferocity of their passion for this perfect infant.

And Frieda had reached out her arms and taken the baby, and he had lain there on her bosom in gracious ease, nestling comfortably, tightening his little fingers round her smooth amber beads. She had walked him up and down the room, singing over him, droning, as she had sung intermittently to her own children. An incantation, a strange, rhythmic, tuneless keening. 'Il
est né, le divin enfant, Chantons tous son événement,'
she had spontaneously, inappropriately, blasphemously chanted, as she paced up and down the stripped floorboards, patting the child's round blue cocooned elasticated bottom in time to the beat of the song.

Later, she put on her reading glasses to inspect his face more closely: Benjamin caught at the gold chain from which she suspended them. She read his face, and he read hers. ‘Benjamin,' she said to him appraisingly, ‘you are the youngest child of Israel, Benjamin. You are the child of War, you are the warrior babe. You are Beltenebros, the Beautiful Obscure.' Who can tell what the child hears? He takes in everything. Has Frieda put a spell upon him, like the wicked godmother?

Gogo will have no more children, for, with the birth of Benjamin, she suffered a prolapse. She wears a metal ring within her. She tells nobody of this, not even her sister or her friends. The ring is her secret. David knows. It keeps her chaste and faithful to David, but does it compel his fidelity to her, or does it release him? She asks no questions, to be told no lies. She does not want to lose David.

David is unfaithful to her with her mother, or so she suspects. And she is right to be suspicious. For years, Frieda has wooed and tempted David. She has sent him notes and postcards, to his college address, to his television address, occasionally to his home address. Now she sends him messages from her castle by the sea. Frieda Haxby knows David's ambitions. She has cast herself as his Lady Macbeth. She knows what tempts him.

The morning after the Aga evening, the Sunday morning, Patsy Palmer rises early, unstacks the dishwasher, lays plates and beakers and jams on the table for breakfast, washes a couple of lettuces, puts a casserole of beans and bacon in the bottom Aga, feeds the dog and the cats, sweeps up the remains of a mangled rabbit and throws it out among the nasturtiums, waters the plants, and wonders if she is crazy. Why does she do all this? What is she trying to prove? She is off to Meeting in Hartley Bessborough, some ten miles away, to commune with a God that she suspects does not exist, to ponder her sins which do, to worry about her mother (for she has a mother, the Palmers are not the only family with a mother, though you wouldn't know this if you Listened to them, as she is obliged to do) and to pick up, on her way back, Judge Partington and his wife, who are coming to lunch. (Judge Partington has crashed his car into the back of his own garage and is temporarily off the road.)

Patsy yawns, combs her hair, smiles at herself, and eats a slice of toast. She is satisfied with herself and her sins. And she is looking forward to an hour of silence, away from her in-laws. Thank God none of them is religious. It would be the last straw if any of them said they wanted to come to Meeting with her. (Nathan had accompanied her once, out of curiosity. The silence had nearly driven him mad. He had heaved and breathed in restless misery, listening to the rude noise of his own treacherous guts. Never again, he had moaned, upon release.)

Simon and Emily sleep on, as Patsy sets off across the countryside. But David and Daniel are out in the garden, strolling on the lawn, talking men's talk. Gogo and Rosemary watch them from the upstairs-landing window. The Virginia creeper coils its little tender tendrils inwards into the house. The corpse of a small bird lies in the creeper's nestwork, staring up at them from dead eyes and open beak. Gogo and Rosemary do not see it, for they are watching their menfolk. David has hooked his thumbs alertly in his pockets, Daniel's hands are clasped gravely behind his back.

‘Daniel's hair's getting very thin,' says Rosemary, after studying him for a few moments.

‘So's mine,' says Gogo, patting her headscarf. ‘It's the Haxby genes. You seem to have got Palmer hair.'

‘Who knows what Palmer hair looks like?' asks Rosemary, and they both laugh.

‘Benjie's lucky. David has good hair,' says Rosemary. ‘And in the right place too. On top of his head.'

‘There are some advantages in marrying a wog,' says Gogo.

David and Daniel are discussing weightier matters than hair loss. Daniel is professing a cultivated ignorance in the face of David's description of a seminar on Cultural Appropriation which is to be held in Calgary in October. David has been invited to attend, and is not sure whether to accept. Daniel has followed with interest David's update of the slow progress of the trade-name dispute on Demerara, which threatens to involve some large agrofood businesses, but the phrase ‘Cultural Appropriation' is, he claims, a new one on him. He wrinkles his nose fastidiously, his eyes crinkle into the dryest of dry smiles: like High Court judges who feign innocence of the existence of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, he feigns ignorance of Canada's leading role in the debate on communitarianism and ethnic minorities. Quebec he has heard of and admits to, but he disclaims any knowledge of the native minorities and their anti-Quebecois stance, and as for the notion that a white man cannot write about or represent in court a black or brown man, or vice versa–well, it leaves him gobsmacked. ‘Gobsmacked,' repeats Daniel delicately. (He has picked up some contemporary phrases from his children, and uses them occasionally, in ‘scare quotes', in a manner that he hopes is endearing. It works quite well in court.) ‘Are you telling me that a person can only represent or speak for that category of person which he or she happens to be? Isn't that rather restrictive?'

‘So some in Calgary will argue, no doubt,' says David. ‘Others, not.'

‘And what do you think about it?'

‘Me personally? Oh, I'm so deep into cultural appropriation that there's no way back for me. No way I can get back to cultural innocence. Yet it must be admitted that it wouldn't be to my advantage to admit this in public or let it be known that I think it. My bread is buttered on the other side.' He pauses, continues. ‘On the other hand, it's dangerous for me to take the other line to extremes. There's a line that claims that Philip Larkin is a racist bastard because he didn't notice that there were any coloured folk in Hull. Or at least, even if he did, he didn't bother to put them in his poems.'

‘Do people argue that?' asks the
faux-naif
Daniel.

‘Yes, of course they do. It's the new white man's burden. He's not allowed to write or speak
as
a black man, but he's damned if he doesn't recognize their existence and their otherness. Damned if he appropriates, damned if he neglects. It's a fine line.'

‘And what's the new black man's burden?'

‘Oh, the black man has so many burdens, old and new, that they can't be counted.'

They turn at the right angle of the lawn, by the wall of roses, and continue their patrol along the herbaceous border where the giant spurges cluster.

‘As a matter of fact,' says David in parenthesis, ‘there aren't all that many coloured people in Hull. About 0.8 per cent, if I remember rightly. About the same as in Stamford or Sleaford or Spalding, in the depths of Lincolnshire. You'd hardly expect Larkin to address his poems to 0.8 per cent of the population, especially the 0.8 per cent that don't read poets like Larkin. Or to write about them, come to that. Would you?'

Daniel ignores this argument, although he spots a loophole in it, and pursues the question of David D'Anger's own position.

‘So you think it's more useful for you to present yourself as a black man with a particular voice and constituency rather than to speak out on behalf of universal human nature, and all the possibilities of cultural assimilation and neutrality that you so clearly, with all your talents and blessings, represent?' provokes Daniel.

‘Look,' says David. ‘I know the dangers. Uncle Tom. White nigger. Token black. It's better for me to dissemble a little, to play the communitarian game. Anyway, I half believe it. I
am
black. Well, I'm Indian Guyanese. Black's out, as a word, these days. I'm not quite sure what's in, for chaps like me. I think I'm supposed to say I'm a man of colour. They'll update me in Calgary. On the whole, I think the more detail, the safer. Guyanese born, Guyanese and British educated, Indian ancestry, mixed religious background, won't eat beef, Anglo-Saxon wife, mixed-race son, representing–or hoping to represent–a West Yorkshire constituency with a 3.4 per cent Black-Asian vote and several distinct ethnic communities. Sociologist and politician and father of one. With surprisingly poor teeth, in view of my origins and my personal dislike of sugar. That's me.'

‘But tell me,' pursues Daniel, ‘to what precisely do they object, these critics of cultural appropriation? These women who don't want men taking up feminism, these Innuits who won't hire a Swedish, Canadian or American Jew to fight their corner?'

‘If you ask me,' says David, ‘it's all to do with funding. Like everything else, it's to do with money. Most cultural funding these days is based on category, not on individual talent. Don't think I kid myself, I know why I've had an easy ride. Once you're in the saddle, it's easy. But there's never enough funding to go round, and that's why Indians and West Indians and Guyanese and Sri Lankans resent it when white men and women impersonate their attitudes and try to write their books for them and adopt their politically correct positions and get their money to go to conferences. The Northern hemisphere is full of Canadians and Danes and Swedes and Germans busy studying postcolonial culture and digging into old colonial archives in order to get themselves on the next aeroplane out of the rain and down south to the tropical sunshine.
Sehnsucht nach Süde,
that's what Goethe called it. It's a new kind of colonialism. Cultural colonialism. There aren't enough seats at the table, there aren't enough air fares. That's the real problem.'