A Natural Curiosity (3 page)

‘I
like
soggy Yorkshire,’ said Alice, gamely, and the conversation staggered on. But Janice and Edward said nothing more all evening. They had done one another in, they had murdered one another.

If looks could kill. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you.

And now Clive and Susie Enderby sipped their sherry, in the safety of their own home, looking back over the evening before, on the first ominous night of the New Year, contemplating their own marriage and its chances of survival.

Fucking and cooking. Division of labour.

Susie had kept her side of this primitive bargain: Clive wondered, a little uneasily, if he had kept his. The unease of the 1980s. She hadn’t seemed to fancy it much, after the birth of Vicky, but whose fault was that?

These thoughts were uncomfortable: surely it was dinner time? He glanced at his watch ostentatiously, but Susie didn’t seem to notice. He guessed that she was going over it all, apportioning blame, beginning to blame him as well as Edward, blaming all Enderbys, blaming men in general and Enderbys in particular, abstracted by resentment as she sat neatly there in her mustard silk.

But Susie’s mind had moved on. Susie was remembering, with a flutter of panic that she was sure was even now tinting her well-made-up complexion, an encounter on New Year’s Eve, at the Chamber of Commerce dance. An embarrassing encounter, a revival of yet more ancient crimes, and crimes worse (or so it had seemed to her) than cooked giblets in plastic bags, worse than insults over the roast beef. Crimes that she had repressed, disowned, forgotten, until they rose to confront her in the person of Fanny Scott Colvin, whose name she had never ever been able to forget. And there, appallingly, on New Year’s Eve, in the Victoria Hotel, in a black sequined evening dress with great shoulders like wings, like black angel’s wings, stood Fanny Scott Colvin, whom Susie had not seen for twenty years, with whom she had, mercifully, and, she hoped, for ever, lost touch at the age of twelve. She would never have recognized her, never have glimpsed in her that red-haired schoolgirl, but Fanny came swooping up to Susie, and claimed ancient friendship. ‘Susie!’ she shrieked, as though sure of her welcome, ‘It’s Susie Bates, isn’t it? Don’t you remember me? Fanny Scott Colvin I was then, and Fanny Kettle now! How
are
you, Susie? After all these years and years and years?’

And Susie had stood there shocked, amazed that this woman could stand there claiming acquaintance, as though nothing had ever passed between them, as though they were adults in an adult world. Guilt over her association with Fanny Scott Colvin had nearly killed Susie Enderby née Bates, and yet there Fanny stood, calling herself Fanny Kettle, invoking old times, as though they had been times of innocence, of childhood innocence, in the school playground, in the bicycle shed, upstairs in the twin bedroom, in the secret dell.

Two evenings of revelations. Susie thoughtfully stroked the sleeve of her silk blouse. Guilt. No, not guilt. Shame. Yes, that was it, shame. Shame, like a dark stain, pouring through her body, flooding her cheeks. And Fanny Kettle had seemed to feel none of it. ‘We must have tea, coffee, lunch, you must come and see me now I’m a neighbour again!’ declared Fanny Kettle, her red hair blazing, her prominent eyes bulging, her neck extended like a fighting swan’s, and Susie had smiled, coldly, drenched in ancient shame.

Clive Enderby coughed. ‘Would you like another sherry, darling?’ he inquired. Susie looked at her gold Tissot watch. ‘Heavens, it’s late. Sorry,’ said Susie, in a voice that spoke from miles away, a choked small diminished voice. Yes, she’s blaming me, acknowledged Clive Enderby. Fucking and cooking. What a disastrous evening. Would they ever live it down?

Janice Enderby lay on the large double bed, moaning and gurgling and thrashing her head backwards and forwards on the hot pillow. ‘Help
me
,’ she moaned,
‘help
me,
help
me, can’t you
help
me,
help
me.’ On and on, a monotonous keening. A sour perfumed psychotic smell rose from the crumpled sheets. Edward Enderby sat and watched helplessly. ‘Never mind, never mind,’ he said, from time to time, ineffectually. His sharp grey pointed face was peaked with misery. ‘I’m
sorry
, I’m
sorry
, I’m
sorry, help
me,
help
me,
help
me,’ moaned Janice.

A bad start to the new year, said the sardonic corner of Edward Enderby’s consciousness, as the rest of it kept dumb vigil. Yes, a bad start. But at least there’s no one to hear it through the wall. Now we’re detached. Detached misery. Semidetached misery had been hell.

Paul Whitmore was composing a letter about his prison diet, addressed to the prison governor. He had asked Alix’s advice, and she had recommended this course of action. ‘Be polite,’ she had urged. ‘There’s nothing to gain by being rude.’

Paul Whitmore was a vegetarian. He was not satisfied with the variety of diet offered. He would like more fresh vegetables and something other than lettuce and tomatoes in his salad. Eating meat is bad for the mind and body, and leads to aggression. So, laboriously, he informs the Governor. Eating meat is against Paul’s principles.

Paul Whitmore spells it out, as he conjures memories of sides of beef hanging from hooks, of pigs’ heads grinning, of trays of kidneys and livers and lights. These memories fuse suddenly with the image of a woman, sitting in a chair, gazing at herself in a mirror. Her hair stands out from her head in a shining halo of stiff silver spikes, some six inches long. A fevered smell of burning fills the room.

Paul Whitmore shakes his head, dully, like an animal on which a fly has settled, and the images separate and dissolve. Doggedly, he continues his letter to the Governor.

‘Last week,’ he writes, laboriously, ‘I had potatoes with tinned peas, twice . . . ’ Paul Whitmore leads a sedate, solitary life in prison, protected from his fellows by Rule 43.

Alix Bowen, driving home towards her husband Brian and her son Sam, bottles for the Bottle Bank clinking merrily in her car boot, is glad she does not have to look forward to a supper of tinned peas. Tinned peas had been one of the torments of her childhood. They are one of the few foodstuffs she still finds repulsive. Repulsive pulse. She does not blame P. Whitmore for finding them unpalatable, but then, if he’s so fussy about what he eats, he shouldn’t have put himself in a position where he can’t pick and choose, should he? Refrain from Murder and Eat what you Want.

It is dark now, and she cannot see the white landscape. The river running through the little town above the prison had been fringed with slabs of ice. How the Romans must have hated it, up here. P. Whitmore’s book claimed that they imported vast quantities of wine, olives, figs, mulberries, raisins and a pickled fish sauce made of mashed sprats, pepper, lovage, caraway, honey and vinegar. But these luxuries probably hadn’t reached them up here, the legionaries pitted against the Brigantes probably had to make do with barley and lentils and cabbage and lard. The tinned peas of yesteryear. Or was that view of the diet of Roman legions out of date now? Hadn’t somebody recently proved that the Roman legions, even in the far north, ate quite a lot of meat? A dim memory of an article in
The TLS
flutters in Alix’s mind. Is nothing safe, is all knowledge to be revised, will not the dead lie quietly with their stomachs full of cabbage, do we have to chop them up and anatomize them again and again and again?

All sorts of delicacies had reached Northam and Brigantia since Alix’s wartime cabbage childhood. Now one could buy fresh coriander, cumin, mangoes, Chinese leaves, and more than one variety of mushroom. Despite the decay of the manufacturing industries, despite the slump.

Alix ponders privation. She wonders if P. Whitmore expects her to slip him condoms full of heroin, which she gathers are all the rage amongst the criminal population these days, or whether he has decided she’s a dead loss as far as that kind of thing goes, and good only for bars of chocolate and books. P. Whitmore does not seem interested in drugs, though he had in his time been a heavy drinker. Vodka and peppermint had pepped him up on his night sorties.

Alix wouldn’t know heroin if she saw it. Once, years ago, when her elder son Nicholas had just left home, she discovered while clearing out his bedroom a carefully secreted old Maxwell House coffee jar containing some strange white powdered substance. She had stared at it with suspicion. What was it? Was it illegal? She did not trust Nicholas at all. She sniffed it, and finally, greatly daring, put her finger in and conveyed a speck to her tongue.

Detergent. Unmistakable detergent. Daz, or perhaps Persil.

How
deeply
law-abiding I have been, thinks Alix to herself, as she drives homewards towards baked potatoes and, she hopes, a nicely roasted guinea fowl, with some spinach purée from the freezer. And, as she drives, pondering her willingness, nay eagerness, to see the upsetting P. Whitmore, a new lump of memory detaches itself from the frozen forgotten backward stretches, and bumps downstream into the light. As a child, as a nice, timid obsequious law-abiding deputy headmaster’s daughter, she had been haunted by the idea that one day she would find herself in the dock
accused of a terrible crime which she had not committed
. For years, this notion had haunted her, for years she had prepared her defence, her moving pleas for acquittal, her heart-rending reproaches upon conviction. Why? What on earth had all that been about? Alix smiled to herself at the absurdity of her childhood fantasies. What on earth had caused them? Had her mother unjustly blamed her for eating a slice of cake? Had her sister unjustly blamed her for losing her French Grammar? Had she been found masturbating?

Heroic courtroom dramas she had staged in her head. Innocent Alix Doddridge, a mere waif of a girl, accused of—of what? Murder, infanticide, treason? Alix could hardly recall. Nor could she now remember whether the essence of these daydreams was that she
felt
innocent or
felt
guilty. She suspected that she must have felt guilty, or the fantasies would not have been so elaborate, indeed would not have arisen at all.

Paul Whitmore did not feel guilty, although he admitted guilt. Alix felt guilty when she was not, and knew she was not.

Alix added this perception to the conundrum, drew this new line into her equation.

Paul Whitmore was not getting much psychiatric help at Porston. The chap that he saw once a week sounded a fool. Alix had, by and large, a perhaps exaggerated respect for the psychiatric profession, fostered by her friendship with Liz Headleand and
Liz
Headleand’s first husband Edgar Lintot, both people possessed, in Alix’s view, of compassion and common sense. This chap up at Porston, from P.W.’s account, did not seem to have much of either. Though that doesn’t mean he’s not a professional. Maybe he knows what he’s doing, after all, thinks Alix Bowen.

But she doubts it.

Alix sees herself in the dock, pleading her case. She is convicted, perhaps, of participating in the Human Condition. Is that it?

Alix gnaws on, like the stubborn Utah mouse.

Nature and nurture. She would like to acquit Mankind, and if she can acquit P. Whitmore, then she can acquit absolutely anybody. Anybody and everybody. Nurture and nature. Alix cannot help believing in the nurture argument, as the nature argument is so
unfair
.

Why on earth should Paul Whitmore have been born a murderer?

Or made one, come to that?

Alix feels it is very, very unfair.

The one thing she cannot believe is that Paul Whitmore, of his own free (God-given?) will,
chose
to hack the heads off various young women by and near the Harrow Road, and
chose
thus to end up eating tinned peas in Porston Prison. She is sorry, but that she simply cannot believe. And that is my last word on this subject for tonight, she says aloud to the empty passenger seat of her car, as she enters the yellow fluorescent glare of the suburbs of Northam, and sees the steep hillside of home.

‘Rat a tat
tat
, Who is
that
, Only grandma’s pussy
cat
,’ chants Alix’s friend Liz Headleand, to the step-granddaughter bouncing on her knee. The baby laughs, obligingly, but Liz has forgotten the rest of the rhyme. It is a long time since she bounced a baby on her knee. ‘Rat a tat
tat
,’ she repeats. The baby does not seem to mind repetition. Liz is delighted to have a step-grandchild. It is about time. Jonathan, her stepson, the father of this child, is into his thirties. Liz had begun to think that none of her stepchildren or children would ever reproduce. Something had put them off family life and babies—her own behaviour, their father’s behaviour, the overcrowding of Britain, the violence of city life, the nuclear threat, the decline of Empire? Any or all of these things could have done it. But Jonathan and his silly wife Xanthe had overcome these hesitations, or else the Life Force had overcome them independently: either way, there bounced and wriggled young Cornelia Headleand, triumphant, in her fancy little smocked and embroidered dress.

Xanthe does dress the child oddly, Liz thinks. But then, Xanthe dresses oddly herself. All bows and ribbons and bits of glitter on her stockings. Liz thought all that kind of thing had gone out decades ago, but she supposes it could have gone in and gone out again several times while she wasn’t looking. Do other people
really
wear these funny balloony puffed up Bo-Peep very short skirts? Liz has never seen them around anywhere. Liz thinks Xanthe is a bit batty. Yes, that’s the word for her. Batty. Those bright eyes, those shiny dark-red lips, those very white teeth, that strange vacant giggle. Liz prefers the toothless young Cornelia. But recognizes that probably Xanthe Headleand is quite the thing. In whatever circle it is that she and Jonathan move in.

She’s not very good with the baby, Liz thinks. Doesn’t know how to keep her happy, holds her awkwardly, looks nervous when she cries. At home, Xanthe has a nanny for the baby. I mustn’t interfere, says Liz to herself, as she marvels at the child’s soft blooming skin. No wonder mothers want to devour their babies with kisses, feel the urge to gobble them all up. Cannibal mothers.