A Natural Curiosity (10 page)

Paul Whitmore is carefully copying in fine pencil the famous outlines of the bronze horse mask found at Stanwick. Probably a chariot ornament, the text tells him. The sad blind horse face stares in curved Celtic lines. Paul is a poor draughtsman, he is dissatisfied with his handiwork, he rubs it out and begins again. Bronze, dull bronze, buried, now bright again. The last stand of Venutius. The triumph of the Romans. It has square pierced ears, the bronze mask, holes by which it had once been attached to long-rotted wood. In his mother’s salon, Mrs Murphy had pierced the ears of the young women of Toxetter.

He rubs out, begins again, discards. The enigmatic horse stares. Heads had hung in rows from hooks. Pigs’ heads. Not horses’ heads. The British do not eat horse. They do not even feed horse to their dogs and cats. Horse is totem, taboo, sacred. But there had been jokes about horsemeat, unkind jokes in the little town. Horsemeat. Whoresmeat. Somebody had made such a pun. He hadn’t known what it had meant, had make the mistake of asking his father, over tea. Had been clipped over the ear, shut out of the house, while they screamed and ranted at one another. Near the end, that had been.

He turns the pages of Alix’s book. There is a bronze mask boss from the River Thames at Wandsworth. Alix Bowen had lived in Wandsworth, she tells him. Sometimes she describes her life there. She describes the house that is now let to a visiting professor from Australia. She describes the neighbourhood, the shops, compares notes with North Kensington, where Paul Whitmore and Esther Breuer had lived.

Paul Whitmore does not know the region where he is now imprisoned: he knows it only through books. He knows London, where he earned the sobriquet of ‘The Horror of Harrow Road’, and he knows the small town in the north Midlands, of the hairdressing salon and the butcher’s shop, where he was known as Piggy Paul the Porker (although he is not and never has been fat). He has drifted in other places (a few months in Manchester, a year in Stoke-on-Trent), but he has become a Londoner, a drifting Londoner, a lost Londoner. Now he is nowhere, in limbo, in a coffin. He does not know Northam. He has never been there. It is to him a fictitious city, a city of the mind. Alix describes it to him sometimes. He cannot visualize it well. He knows nobody else who lives in it. Alix is his sole personal source of information about Northam and Leeds.

He turns the pages of the book, to the paragraphs on Celtic ritual and the impact of the Romans on the Old Religion. A wooden rubbed armless old god from Ralaghan, County Cavan, stares at him expressively, reproachfully, balefully. He reads: ‘A grove there was, untouched by men’s hands from ancient times, whose interlacing boughs enclosed a space of darkness and cold shade, and banished the sunlight from above . . . gods were worshipped there with savage rites, the altars were heaped with hideous offerings and every tree was sprinkled with human gore . . . The images of the gods, grim and rude, were uncouth blocks, formed of felled tree trunks . . . The people never resorted thither to worship at close quarters but left the place to the gods.’ A quotation from Lucan, the poet. Not Lucan, the murderer.

Paul Whitmore has made of himself a hideous offering. Here he is, offered up. But no one can see him. He is absent, obscure. No light reaches him. No one looks at him, save his fellow-prisoners, the prison officers and the blue eyes of Alix Bowen. Is this what he had wanted? He does not know. He knows there had been a need for sacrifice, for appeasement. The gods had wanted a sacrifice. But of what nature? Had it been accepted? One does not worship at close quarters. It is not safe to go too near the sacred grove.

As he sits there, chewing the end of a pencil, the people of Britain are still in the process of making him up, of inventing him. He had offered himself up to their imagination, as he had offered up his victims. What will they make of him, of them? Will they fail him, themselves? Sometimes he thinks that Alix Bowen will be able to invent him, that her story will make sense, that it will persuade the newspapers and the courts and the people. Sometimes he thinks she is incapable of doing anything of the sort.

Paul Whitmore would like to ask Alix Bowen to try to contact his mother. He has not heard from his mother since she ran away, fifteen years ago. He knows that in similar cases parents have been retraced, interrogated, their memoirs have been purchased for vast sums by the tabloids.

So far, he has not dared to suggest this course of action to Alix. He does not quite know how to bring the subject up. It is a little delicate. He is hoping that she might think of the idea for herself. On her next visit, perhaps, he will drop another hint. By months, her visits are measured. He will wait for the next moon.

It is early March, and daffodils bloom in London window boxes. A faint false spring deceives the buds, and trees turn bronze, pink, lime green. Liz Headleand is lunching with her old friend and enemy Ivan Warner, as she does once or twice a year. They gossip. On Ivan’s part, at least, seriously, professionally. Ivan is a gossip columnist. He likes to pick Liz’s brains. He is always hoping that Liz will present him with a psychiatric scoop. As one of her specialities has been the problems associated with the reuniting of adopted children with their true parents, maybe she will one day find for him an abandoned princeling, a reclaimed cabinet minister, a film star’s rejected babe, a tycoon’s incestuous marriage with his own daughter? The plot possibilities in Liz’s line of business are endless, he reminds her, as he plies her with Pinot Chardonnay and admires the little pastry fish swimming in the saffron sauce of her ivory sole.

‘No,’ says Liz, ‘nothing. Nothing exciting at all. Sorry.’

She smiles at him, amiably. It is only a game. He knows she will not tell. Her heart softens to Ivan, over the years. She used to think him a dangerous little man, but time has mellowed him or strengthened her, she is not sure which, and she no longer half fears him. She indulges him. And he her.

‘I
had
heard,’ said Ivan, in that inimitably suggestive way of his, ‘that we were to be honoured with the sight of you on television? Can this be true, I asked myself? I
had
thought you didn’t approve of the television.’

‘Who told you?’ asked Liz, disconcerted despite herself.

‘I can’t remember,’ said Ivan.

‘Well,’ said Liz. ‘I did agree to be on this panel thing. That’s all.’

‘I wonder why?’ insinuates Ivan.

‘I don’t know
why
,’ says Liz. ‘I mean, why not?’ But she also wonders why. She admires, yet again, his sense of her weak spots, her Achilles’ heel.

‘It’s just not your style, that’s all,’ says Ivan.

‘No, I suppose not,’ says Liz. ‘But they were very pressing. And I thought it was time
somebody
talked some sense.’

‘So we shall have the pleasure of seeing you talking sense?’

‘I hope so,’ says Liz, briskly, staring hard at his inquiring small black well-hidden eyes.

‘Well,’ says Ivan, ‘you’re a brave woman.’

‘But of course,’ says Liz.

‘I didn’t know you knew Christopher?’ says Ivan, gently probing, cutting in half a green bean with the edge of his flat fork.

Liz’s mind races. Christopher? Does she know a Christopher? Ah, yes, she has got it. Christopher What’s-his-name, newly appointed Director of Programmes for PPS. What
is
his name? A false trail. An utterly false trail. So
that’s
why Ivan was interested in her TV appearance.

‘Oh,
Christopher
,’ she says. ‘Of course I know Christopher. I’ve know him
for years!

Ivan can tell he has drawn a blank. He loses interest in the pursuit, switches track, starts again.

‘And your ex?’ he inquires. ‘How’s old Charles?’

‘Oh,
Charles!
’ says Liz. ‘He’s mad, poor darling.’

‘I heard he broke his nose?’

‘Mugged,’ says Liz. ‘Nothing personal. Just mugged.’

‘And how’s his business?’

Liz shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t understand such stuff. He seems to have switched his interests to some kind of Euronews project. It’s all to do with satellites. I’m sure you know more about it than I do.’

Liz has no intention of mentioning the Baldai fantasy to Ivan: it would not even amuse him, it is too bizarre, too foreign. She allows him to rattle on for a while about Charles’s ex-wife Lady Henrietta, one of whose children has been involved in a drugs scandal. A small, dull drugs scandal. Liz cannot take much interest in it, can feel only a very limited degree of
Schadenfreude
, as she can think with only a limited degree of complacency of her own family. They may not go in for quite such vacuous pursuits as the upper classes, but they cause her anxiety, nevertheless, in their separate ways, and there seems little point in triumphing over Lady Henrietta’s bad management. She refuses to be drawn into bitching about Henrietta.

Ivan moves from Lady Henrietta to Robert Oxenholme, Minister of Sponsorship for the Arts, by a transition that seems more natural to him than it does to Liz, for Liz has forgotten that these two characters are vaguely related, that their names are part of the meaningless genealogical reticulation of Hestercombes, Ox-enholmes and Stocklinches. Liz is more interested in Robert, for he is a friend of her friend Esther, and it is this connection that Ivan wishes to probe.

‘Well,’ says Liz, ‘the last I heard, they were writing a book together. On some minor Bolognese or Ferraran figure. But I don’t suppose they’ll ever finish it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Esther never finishes anything. And Robert’s too busy.’

‘Why doesn’t Esther finish anything?’

Liz considers. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’ve often wondered. She lacks ambition. Not confidence, but ambition. I don’t think she sees the point. Of trying to make a lasting mark.’

‘It seems odd, perhaps. When her profession is to study the lasting marks of others?’

Liz smiles.

‘And you, Liz, how lasting will your mark be? Do you ever wonder?’

Liz stares at Ivan, who squats before her, neckless, toadlike, but, like a toad, somehow enchanting.

‘In my job,’ she says, ‘one doesn’t expect to make a
lasting
mark. One’s patients recover, recirculate, suffer less. That is all.’

‘And yet,’ says Ivan, ‘some would say your profession is full of megalomaniacs who long to live for ever, and who impose their views on others with an autocratic zeal, and who are quite happy to kill off all dissent in order that their own names should shine more brightly in the halls of fame?’

‘You’re only speaking of a small percentage. Of the stars. I grant that many of them are megalomaniacs. But there are a lot of quiet toilers in the vineyard. Like myself.’

‘I’ve never seen you as a quiet toiler.’

‘That’s because you never see me at work, you only ever see me at play. Eating a nice lunch, like this. Wasting time in the company of timewasters like yourself.’

‘
I
think of you as a more—forceful figure. A bit more of a star than you suggest! Surely?’

‘That’s very kind of you. But to be a star, one has to . . . ’ She hesitates. She is not sure if she wants this conversation, is not quite sure how Ivan led her into it.

‘Yes?’ he prompts.

‘To publish. To have one’s own theory. To defend one’s own theory. To be—in a word—original.’

‘And you think you are not?’

‘I know I am not. I am a pluralist. I take from here and there, I use other people’s bits and pieces. I use what seems useful. This seems to me pragmatic. It’s a good way to care for patients, but it’s not a good way to make oneself famous.’

‘But you have published, I thought?’

‘Only papers. Articles. Like Esther, I’ve never got round to writing a whole book.’

‘But you could, now, presumably? Now you have time, and the family are all grown?’

‘Ivan, what
is
this? Why are you being so peculiarly mephistophelean? My life is perfectly busy, thank you, without any further ambitions. Why can’t I just carry on as I am?’

‘Why not indeed?’

A little plate of dark red salad arrives at Liz’s left hand. She rearranges it with her fork, and chews a bitter leaf.

‘Fame is the spur,’ she says, after a while, ‘that the clear spirit doth raise, the last infirmity of noble minds . . . A very honest statement that, on Milton’s part, I’ve always thought. But for some reason Esther and I don’t seem to suffer from it. No doubt because we are nice, modest, unassuming women. We don’t need to see our names in print every week. As you do.’

‘Well, yes, I do, I admit it,’ says Ivan. ‘It’s like a disease with me.’

‘An infirmity.’

‘Yes. An infirmity.’

‘Actually,’ says Liz, ‘what I
do
suffer from is curiosity. I want to know
what really happened.’

‘When?’

‘At the beginning. When human nature began. At the beginning of human time. And I know I’ll never know. But I can’t stop looking. It’s very frustrating. When occasionally it comes over me that I’ll never know, I can’t quite believe it. Surely, one day, I will find out?’

‘We don’t even know what happened in our own lives. Let alone the life of the species.’

‘No. I know that’s true. But I can’t help waiting for the revelation.’

‘When you’ve had it, will you publish it?’

Liz laughs. ‘No, no, it will be the end of the world, there will be no more publishing and delivering of lectures,’ she says.

‘You are in an apocalyptic vein, suddenly.’

‘It is your fault, Ivan. You encourage me.’

‘So apocalyptic are you that you are failing to see what is sitting in front of your own nose. You say you suffer from insatiable curiosity, but you let me ask all the questions. Ask me a question, Liz.’

Liz looks at him, sharply. Is he teasing her? Is it a trick?

‘What question shall I ask you, Ivan?’

‘No, no, you are the clever one, you are the diviner. You must guess.’

‘Not the answer, but the question?’

‘That’s correct. You must guess the question.’

Liz, comically exercised by guilt and conscience (for it is true that she never asks Ivan about himself, always lets him make the running), peers at him, as though hoping to read his face, his mind. He smiles back, shrugs his shoulders, crinkles his eyes at her, taps his chin with his thumb, and raises his glass.