A Natural Curiosity (2 page)

She talked about him to Brian, and to her friend Liz Headleand, and to her employer, the ancient poet Howard Beaver, the Grand Old Man of Yorkshire letters. The ancient poet was way beyond all moral judgement, and was possessed, in the last evenings of his life, with what Alix considered an admirably lively curiosity about Paul Whitmore.

The ancient poet would listen, fascinated, as Alix described what she had learned of Paul’s childhood and background. The father was a butcher, the mother a hairdresser, in a small town in the north Midlands. When the mother ran off with a lorry driver, Paul had been taken into care for a while, and then returned to his father. He had been taken on a school outing at the age of eleven to see the Bog Man of Buller. He had become obsessed by death and human sacrifice. He had devoured books on the Druids and Stonehenge, on the Celts and the Romans, on the old gods. History had been his favourite subject, although he had also, less dangerously, enjoyed botany. He had no doubt seemed a docile pupil, with a good future ahead. A quiet boy, who liked to avoid the playground’s rough and tumble, who liked to keep his nose in a book.

Beaver too had been, was interested in ancient Britain. He had even written a poem about the Bog Man of Buller. He was very interested in Paul Whitmore’s interests.

He made Alix find the poem, read it aloud to her, noisily. It was an uncollected piece, originally published in
Collusion
. ‘You can read it to your murderer, if you like,’ he offered, helpfully, provocatively.

‘No thank you,’ said Alix, primly. ‘I don’t think he’d like it. He’s not into Modernism. He likes Swinburne.’

Reading Swinburne, alone, in his lonely flat. Dusky ladies, delicious tortures, Our Lady of Pain.

Paul did not, in fact, read Swinburne, but he might have done, reflected Alix. As she invented P. Whitmore.

The ancient poet found the whole subject very entertaining.

A poet and a murderer. Odd company I now keep, thought Alix to herself jubilantly as she traversed the sodden high flatland, beneath a winter sky.

Ancient crimes arise to declare themselves, to invite detection. Graves weep blood, sinners return to the fatal scene, the primal crime. And Alix Bowen once again finds herself in front of Paul Whitmore, in the visiting room, with its strange huge view. This Victorian building is so designed that once inside, once through the clanging gates and the turning of the keys, one cannot see the walls and watch-towers that surround it. There is an illusion of freedom, of space, of being islanded upon the moor. Not imprisoned, but stranded, with all perspectives opening, helplessly, widely, impersonally, meaninglessly, for ever.

Alix is entranced and appalled by this view, but looks down from it to Paul Whitmore, who is inspecting Alix’s gift.

Thank you very much,’ he says, politely.

‘It’s really quite interesting,’ says Alix. ‘In fact, I think I may get myself a copy too.’

Paul Whitmore leafed through the pages, pausing at a photograph of a Parisi chariot burial. A skeleton lay between two great preserved iron wheels, which retained traces of wooden spokes.

‘There’s an exhibition of British archaeology on at the British Museum,’ said Alix. ‘A friend sent me a catalogue. I must try to get down to see it.’

Paul was reading the captions. ‘A woman,’ he said. ‘A tribal queen, it says. They say she was buried with a side of pork on top of her. And an iron mirror.’

‘A side of
pork
?’ echoed Alix. ‘I missed that bit. Show me.’

He handed the book back to her. She stared.

‘I can’t see a side of pork,’ she said.

‘I suppose it rotted,’ said Paul Whitmore.

‘Then how did they know it was there?’ asked Alix. Foolishly. Paul looked at her in friendly contempt, and they both laughed.

‘I don’t know much about archaeological techniques,’ said Alix, in apology.

‘I had a letter from my Dad,’ said Paul. ‘He says he’s shut up the shop. My fault, he says.’

Alix did not want to imply that it was not, so said nothing.

‘He blames me,’ continued Paul, experimentally.

‘He must be getting on a bit anyway,’ said Alix, as a diversionary tactic, as a semi-excuse. One of these days, Alix fears, Paul will ask her to go and visit his father. She half hopes he will, half fears it. Paul’s father had been pursued by and interviewed by the press at the time of the trial, but had not said much. Would he have more to say now?

‘Fifty-eight, he is,’ said Paul.

A silence fell, during which Alix reflected that she was getting on a bit too and that, though it did not seem so to her, it must seem so to others, including Paul, who was young enough to be her son.

Paul abandoned the subject of his father, turned another page, and lit on a picture of a coin portraying the vanquished Britannia, elegantly perched. From the next page, the Colchester sphinx with a human head in her forepaws gazed bare-breasted at them. Riddles, mysteries. How to read them?
Was
there any way of reading them? Was this mild amateur scholar victim, villain or accident? The sphinx’s nose was battered, but her wings were powerfully built, undamaged.

Alix could tell that Paul was pleased with the book, and this gave her pleasure. Though why she should try so hard to please a convicted multi-murderer is a riddle, a mystery.

Ancient crimes. Clive and Susie Enderby contemplated them over a glass of sherry. Separately, together, a whole assortment of them. They were both in a state of mild shock, though neither would have admitted it. The new year had begun badly. This evening, Susie had put on her new mustard-coloured layered coordinates, to cheer herself up, but they hadn’t made her feel all that cheerful. She kept glancing at herself in the carefully angled mirror over the fake marble mantelshelf, to keep up morale. And this was supposed to be a good year, a prosperous year, with Enderby & Enderby in its glittering new premises in Dean Street and Clive in the running to become the youngest ever President of the Chamber of Commerce. A pity it had started off on such an odd note. They should never have gone to Janice’s. It was Janice’s fault. But the mustard was a good shade. And a good dry silky rustly texture too. She stroked her own sleeve. Amber. Amber would look good on the mustard. The false gas fire glowed.

Domestic tranquillity. The children were playing upstairs, already in their nightclothes, model children. The table was laid in the dining-room, with cloth and candles, for a rare quiet meal together. Susie had looked forward to this evening, had hoped that it might be a small occasion for celebration, for self-congratulation, for closeness. Not that she had consciously thought that she and Clive were growing apart, no, but he was so busy these days, so preoccupied—as indeed he was now, but at least it was by something that she knew about, something that she understood. Susie did not understand Regional Development Grants and European Investment Strategies and Incentive Zones, but she understood all too well what had happened the night before, at Janice’s, and could feel herself, despite herself, drawn towards dragging it up again. Clive couldn’t just go on sitting there, saying nothing, sipping his sherry. And why was he having a sherry anyway? He usually had a gin and tonic. Was it meant to be some kind of comment or something?

The silence was irritable, painful. It was all Janice’s fault.

‘What an evening,’ said Susie, at last, irresistibly. ‘I’m never going to try to make you go to Janice’s again.’

‘No need to assume responsibility,’ said Clive. ‘She’s my sister-in-law, not yours.’

‘But I was at school with her,’ said Susie.

That’s hardly
your
fault,’ said dynamic thirty-eight-year-old Clive Enderby, with a shade of his usual briskness.

‘Though as a matter of fact,’ said Susie, ominously changing position in the corner of the settee, ‘though as a matter of
fact
, I don’t quite see
why
we were all so upset. By what Janice said. After all, it was probably true.’

Clive gazed at his bouncy chestnut-haired wife in alarm. She couldn’t want to talk about it, could she? He couldn’t face it. No, he couldn’t face it. There are some things one just can’t talk about. Janice had cheated. She had broken the rules. Was every wife in Hansborough, Breasborough and Northam, was every wife in Yorkshire, about to start cheating too?

Susie smiled, edgily.

‘Actually,
I
blame Edward,’ she said.

‘I don’t see why we have to blame anyone,’ said Clive. ‘It’s not Edward’s fault that he’s married to a neurotic bitch on the verge of a nervous breakdown.’

‘How do you know it isn’t?’ asked Susie.

Feminism had reached South Yorkshire with a vengeance, in the 1980s. Or at least that is one interpretation of the scene at Edward Enderby’s on New Year’s Day, and of Susie’s reaction to that scene.

I suppose, thought Clive, we may live to find it funny. But it hadn’t been funny at the time. And Susie was right, the whole thing was probably Edward’s fault. Edward had always been a bully, with a sadistic sense of humour: where he got it from, his younger brother Clive couldn’t imagine. Early ill health, perhaps. Quick-tempered Edward, always ready to put people down. Thin, even gaunt, now, in his early forties. Pushing and pushing. Teasing beyond the limit. Ambition disappointed. He’d always taken it out on Clive, but Clive, so brightly prosperous, had learned to fight back amiably, without hurting, without being hurt. Why quarrel with one’s one-and-only brother? That had been Clive’s attitude.

But last night had been over the top. Right over the top. Drink, was it? Edward never seemed to drink much, to be drunk, but you could never tell. He’d started at the beginning of dinner, teasing Susie about her new hair colour, teasing Clive about his posh new premises, asking uncomfortable questions of Derek and Alice Newton about their son who’d dropped out of the sixth form at King Henry’s, embarking on a whole run of risky jokes about AIDS. Janice had looked uncomfortable through a lot of this, though whether that was because she didn’t like the chat, or because her mind was elsewhere, you couldn’t really tell. She was a very nervous hostess, was Janice, a bit of a perfectionist who managed to make everyone feel slightly uncomfortable as she dished up not-quite-perfect meals. She kept apologizing because the beef was a little overdone. They all assured her they liked it overdone. And anyway, in Clive’s view it wasn’t overdone at all, it was practically raw, so what was the woman talking about? Not that he minded, he liked it red, himself, he really didn’t like it overdone. He caught Susie’s eye and smiled, as he tucked in. He hated cringing and apologies. He liked people to be sure of themselves. Like Susie.

It was over the second helpings of beef (second helpings they all felt obliged to accept) that Edward really got going. Reminiscing about meals of the past, cooked by their mother. Not a very good topic, in Clive’s view, as the Newtons were new to the district and had never met the colourful quaint old Mrs Enderby, but less dangerous, it proved, than reminiscences about Janice’s early days of cooking. ‘And you’d never believe this, from this
excellent
meal we’ve just eaten tonight,’ said Edward Enderby, smiling a little manically, gesticulating with the carving knife, ‘but Janice, when I first met her, was an
atrocious
cook.
Atrocious
. Couldn’t boil an egg, could you, darling?’ Janice stared at her husband with loathing, while the others politely laughed. ‘You remember that first chicken you cooked, when my mother came round? Left the giblets inside in a little plastic bag, didn’t you? Cooked the little plastic bag and all? Didn’t you, my darling?’

‘That wasn’t for your mother,’ said Janice, in a reasonably equable tone. ‘I remember it well. It was for Kate and Bill Amies. It
was
embarrassing.’

So far, so good. They all sat round and munched the red flesh.

‘No, no,’ said Edward, his grey eyes glinting, ‘it was definitely for my mother. I remember it well.’

‘No,’ said Janice, firmly, but with a note of slight (and to Clive quite understandable) distress creeping into her manner. ‘No, it wasn’t for your mother, it was for Kate and Bill Amies. I remember it well.’

‘A little of the gravy?’ asked Clive, desperately, passing the new fashionable Christmas present
gras et maigre
sauce-boat along the table to Janice. It ran with thin red blood. No gras, no alleviating emollient gras.

‘No, no, for my
mother
,’ repeated Edward. ‘We did laugh. Yes, you’ve learned a thing or two since then, Janice. You’ve learned a thing or two about cooking since then.’

‘It was Kate and Bill, and we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice. ‘It was the first time we ever had anyone round.’

‘My mother,’ said Edward, helping himself to another roast potato. ‘Yes, you’ve improved since those days.’ And he laughed, heartily, from his thin asthmatic chest.

‘Yes, we’d only been married a fortnight,’ said Janice, staring straight across the table at Edward. ‘I didn’t know much about cooking. And as I remember, you didn’t know much about fucking, in those days. We weren’t much good, either of us. At cooking or fucking.’

Edward’s face was, Clive had to admit to himself, a study. He turned dark red (which for so pale and grey a man was astonishing) and a vein stood up terribly in his forehead.

One didn’t use words like fucking, over dinner, like that, in 1987, in Yorkshire, in the presence of strangers. It wasn’t done. Or certainly not done to use such a word seriously. As Janice Enderby had done.

A terrible silence fell over the gravy. Susie coughed, nervously. Edward twitched. The Newtons looked at their plates. The unspeakable had been said. Three sexual initiations, three wedding nights, three honeymoons, played themselves in mental images for the three couples around the table. Clive and Susie guessed that their memories were the least disagreeable, as they were the ones to find their tongues first.

‘Well, we all learn as we get older,’ said Susie, platitudinously but boldly: and, simultaneously, Clive volunteered ‘Well, I know I shouldn’t say so, but
I
think Janice’s beef is much better than Ma’s ever was, she always overcooked it, and her Yorkshire puddings were like soggy dollops of wet cement.’