The Witch of Exmoor (9 page)

‘But these are the very guys who invented the concept of cultural appropriation, didn't you say? Doesn't it work to their own disadvantage?'

‘Oh, no. They're clever, these theorists. They can always invent a new twist to the theory which means they've got to be there themselves, at the next round, preferably in Singapore or Barbados rather than Calgary, to explain it and represent it. On behalf of the benighted disadvantaged tinted folk who haven't yet learnt that it's their duty to reject all representation and represent themselves.'

‘Hmm,' says Daniel. ‘If you carried one line of this muddle to its logical conclusion, you'd find yourself in a world where you could only vote for yourself. Because only you yourself could speak for the particular bundle of characteristics that you happened quite arbitrarily to be. A solipsistic world.'

‘Sometimes I think that's how it really is. But only in my darker moods. In my lighter moods, I pocket the air fare, attend the get-togethers, make friends and influence people. As you observe.'

‘You wouldn't ever', says Daniel, stooping to pick up a tiny scrap of silver paper from the well-mown lawn, ‘think of going back to Guyana?'

This is a dangerous question, even from a friendly brother-in-law on a Sunday morning in Hampshire, and Daniel knows it. So does David. After a long pause, during which they continue their stately promenade, David replies, ‘I was brought up to think of Britain as my home, even when we lived in Georgetown. Most of my family's here now. I'm more use here, or I kid myself that I'm more use here. We were kicked out under Burnham, you know.'

‘Yes, I know. You were rebels.'

‘We were the wrong race and had all the wrong attitudes. And we weren't safe.'

‘You feel safe here?'

David shrugs. ‘Yes, I do. I've settled in here.' He smiles, a half appeal. ‘And Gogo wouldn't like Georgetown. It's too bloody hot in Georgetown. She wouldn't last a week. She can't even take the Mediterranean.'

‘And Benjamin is British,' says Daniel the tempter.

‘Benjamin can choose for himself one day. I'll take him to see the place when he's older. I'll take him up-country, to the land of jungle and waterfall. To the land of mass suicide. I've never been up-country myself. And if he likes it, he can have it. I hope we're keeping the possibility open. Gogo and I.'

‘Of course,' says Daniel the judicious, ‘it's not as though Britain is the seat
of
empire that it once was. Most of the brain drain goes the other way now, to our ex-colonies. You must have been tempted yourself. As you yourself pointed out, they have more funding.'

‘For people in my category, yes, they have more funding. But I don't want to be American. I don't want Benjie to become American. Would you want Simon and Emily to become American?'

‘I haven't travelled as much as you,' says Daniel. ‘And I've been lucky enough here. Nothing to complain of here.'

‘The Americans', says David, ‘believe in universal human nature. There's a heroism in that. But they believe that universal human nature is or shall be American. Except when they live in universities, when it suits their interest to think otherwise. Or to say they think otherwise. One can't always tell the difference.'

Daniel stops in his tracks for a moment, to stare at an intrusive rosette of plantain in the smooth temperate English green. Then he remarks, with seeming irrelevance, ‘It's bloody hot in Singapore. And in Hong Kong.'

‘Maybe it's Guyana's turn next,' says David. ‘It must come one day. You know how Ralegh described Guyana? “A country that hath yet her maidenhead.” Guyana for the next millennium. Meanwhile, I'll stay here and support the West Indies.'

Daniel, who does not follow the cricket, concedes a victory. Over the garden and the ridge the sun reaches its zenith. Patsy will be back from Meeting soon, her conscience, they suppose, appeased. A smell of slow-cooking beans and garlic and bacon wafts from the open kitchen window towards them. Beneath the pear tree a full-bosomed matron thrush pecks, jerkily, mechanically, at a worm cast, listening from time to time to sounds below the earth. David and Daniel descend three steps to the lower lawn, the sundial and the fishpond. A white lily opens its petals over the water and yellow irises stand in the marge. This is a temperate, a blessed clime, and with global warming may become yet more blessed, at the expense of less fortunate regions. Daniel has done well to remind his ambitious self and his ambitious brother-in-law that Britain is but a small country, although its population is some sixty or seventy times greater than that of Guyana. Its past has been greater than its future, which may or may not be true of Guyana. But its present holds them all. Daniel would keep it as it is, for he profits from its waning empire. David would change it. But he too profits.

They watch the surface of the pond, where pond skaters skim lighdy and rapidly over the meniscus in search of their drowning prey. ‘Yes,' says Daniel, gazing around his own small kingdom with its ancient markers, as the shadow of time's finger moves towards noon. (His recently purchased genuine antique sundial has been set slightly off true by the man from the attic, and time in his garden is a little slower than time on his cheap, Taiwanese, battery-driven watch.) ‘Yes,' says Daniel, ‘it is very pleasant here, on a nice day like this.'

In Meeting, Patsy makes a perfunctory attempt to free her mind from its terrestrial anxieties, fails, and then settles down to them, methodically, as the silent minutes pass, as motes turn in the shafts of light that fall through the plain windows of this square familiar building. Two centuries of quiet settle around her, but her brain is full of noise. She worries about her mother in her expensive rest home, about Daniel's mother embattled on Exmoor. She worries about the next meeting of the Video Control and Surveillance Panel and animal abuse films, about the leak over the study window, and about Daniel's heavy workload and his inability to control it. Will Daniel have a heart attack, she wonders? She worries about the Partingtons' lunch in the Aga–will it be cooking evenly? She worries about Simon's unhealthy pallor and his occasional outbursts of unprovoked aggression; will he be rude to Judge Partington? She suspects that the Partington daughter, Sally, has had a fling with Simon: had it ended in tears, and if so, who was to blame? But most of all, she worries about the man in the attic. Will he ever leave? She worries about him more than she would ever disclose. Her public line is confidence, but sometimes she admits to herself that she is, very slightly, afraid. Not of him, but of what he represents. She likes him, and he makes himself useful. But she fears his category. And he limits her control. He cannot be contained in her frame. She will have to get rid of him. It is an unpleasant necessity.

Meeting today is quiet, though towards the end of the hour, as Patsy twists and turns her pearl ring round and round her finger, secretly, beneath her handbag, old Arthur Clifford rises to his feet and says a few words about our friends in Eastern Europe, and quotes some lines from a Czech poet. He sits down again and silence resumes, until the two elders, Jane Farr and Ronnie Taylor, turn to one another and shake hands, in the spontaneous ritual of Friends. Gradually the gathering stirs back into life, little conversations break out, greetings are made, news exchanged. Patsy, emerging from the Meeting Room into the wax-scented well-polished outer porch, with its notices of jumble sales and WE A lectures and cultural events, pauses to speak to Sonia Barfoot, one of the more congenial and eccentric of the Meeting's members. Sonia has been in hospital again, and there is a soft, vulnerable, pained, washed look about her once plump, once pretty features. Her colourless hair is parted in the middle and drawn tightly back from her face and constrained by two tortoiseshell pins. Her scalp shows pink. An expression of bewildered grief lingers in her pale grey slightly glazed eyes, wide open beneath their bald brows, their long colourless lashes. She is wearing a georgette blouse of lavender blue, a creased linen skirt of darker blue. Spinster's colours. Sonia Barfoot is back from the grave, where once she saw God.

‘Patsy,' she says, making an effort to smile. ‘How good to see you.' They clasp hands. She must be on drugs, thinks Patsy, there is something wrong with her eyes. Or has electricity once more crackled through her skull?

‘You must come and see me soon,' says Patsy. ‘Now you're better.'

‘You're always so busy,' says Sonia Barfoot calmly, without reproach. ‘And I'm not better. Not really.'

‘Ring me,' says Patsy, squeezing the thin, blue-veined, old lady's hand. Sonia is not old, but she seems old. She has suffered too much and it has worn her out. Her suffering is not of the body, but of the mind. ‘Ring me. I must dash. I've got to pick up the Partingtons. I want to speak to you about my prisoner. Keep well, Sonia.'

And she breaks away, and turns and waves, and walks briskly off to the car park, to health, to worldliness, to good food, to those un-Quakerly bottles of Bulgarian red. (Cheap wine at lunch, expensive at dinner, that is the Palmer rule, whoever the guests may be.)

 

Judge Partington is nothing if not worldly. Indeed he is gross. He has to sit in the front seat of Patsy's doggy, muddy Datsun, squeezing his wife unceremoniously into the back. And all the way from his mill house by the water meadows to the Palmer homestead he entertains Patsy with tales of the Bar and the Bench. Partington is an opinionated, a controversial judge, and his face is flushed with rich living and low thinking. Today he is wearing his country gear–a bursting jacket over an open straining checked cotton shirt, and what looks like his gardening trousers. His wife Celia, in contrast, is provocatively well-groomed, and sports a soft navy and white spotted crepe silk dress.

He chatters on, as they bowl over the brow of the ridge, past the wind field, and descend towards the Old Farm. Patsy does not care for local anecdotes and does not listen very hard, though she gathers that there is some story about an injunction that Partington is longing to tell Daniel. Daniel, she thinks, will make a better audience–and indeed, there he is, waiting at the gate, as she bumps over the cattle grid. She slips away, having disgorged her passengers, to attend to the lunch.

Gogo and Rosemary have set the garden table on the veranda, and now they all gather, as introductions are made, as sherry and wine are poured. The younger children circle warily, hungrily, wanting crisps and Bombay Mix but not conversation. Simon and Emily know the Partingtons well, for Simon, as Patsy suspects, had once been involved with their daughter Sally, and Emily, in her riding phase, had shared a pony with her; now both Palmer children wish to forget both daughter and pony, but cannot utterly repudiate them, although Simon asks after Sally in a manner that could be construed as either embarrassed or hostile. (Emily does not have to ask after the pony. It went to the knacker's yard some years ago.) There is another lunch guest, an idle rentier from over the hill who has been playing tennis with David and Daniel and Rosemary. Patsy had been right–Bill Partington has a story to tell, and he wants them all to hear. He settles heavily into a garden chair, which trembles bravely under his weight, and embarks upon his tale.

‘Late last night they delivered it,' he says. ‘This video. Old People's Home, going out on Monday in the 6.30 documentary slot on
South-watch.
The home wanted it stopped. More importantly the relatives. Gross invasion of privacy. False allegations. Indecent filming. So I told them to send it round to me. Celia and I saw it last night. Disgusting, wasn't it, Celia?'

‘Fairly
disgusting,' says his wife judiciously, as she sips her orange juice and casts covert glances at Daniel Palmer's handsome brother-in-law David D'Anger, who is listening to her husband's speech with unfeigned curiosity. Has she seen him somewhere before? Is he in television? Should she warn Bill to watch his big mouth?

‘Bottles on potties, that's what it was,' says Partington, and laughs uproariously. ‘Bottles on potties. Endless shots of bottles on potties. Wrinkled bottles, hairy bottles. And the contents of potties. You can't avoid shit these days. Medical programmes, wildlife programmes, archaeology, stand-up comics–it's all excrement. You wouldn't have got away with it in the old days. Talk about violence guidelines, it's guidelines on shit that we need these days. What, Patsy? Patsy agrees, don't you, Patsy?'

(But Patsy is indoors, carving the joints of the bacon, arranging the slices of pink meat and white fat on the meat dish, licking her fingers, picking out a clove, miles and miles away.)

‘So what did you do?' asks Daniel politely. He enjoys Partington's performances and is glad that his career prospects do not oblige him to take them seriously.

‘Oh, I slammed on the injunction,' says the merry judge, helping himself to a fistful of cashew nuts. ‘Said it was in breach. Nothing
but
breaches, I told them. Can't do that to people. Can't show their bums without asking them. They're not all senile. And guess what? Dick Champer rings me up from the BBC. Direct from the BBC, to complain. Says it's outside my prerogative. Says he'll appeal. He was in a right stew. Fizzing and boiling. Spluttering and choking. Midnight, this was.'

‘And the injunction holds?'

‘Of course it holds,' says Partington, munching away, his teeth spattered with a white spew of chewed wet nut. ‘I'll fix them. I was at Magdalen with Champer. I'll teach him about human dignity. Dick, I said, I challenge you, you show your bare bum on TV, and we'll let it run. You do a bum shot to introduce it, and I'll see what I can do for you. Fair's fair, I said. Do unto others. I've
seen
his bum, and I can tell you it's not a pretty sight.'

‘So what will happen?'

‘We'll see on Monday,' says Bill Partington, grinning broadly and reaching out his paw for more nuts, but at that moment Patsy appears at a window, a cordless telephone in her hand, and calls, ‘Bill! Bill! It's for you.'