A Natural Curiosity (7 page)

Alix types on. ‘We would very much appreciate any help you can give us,’ she continues.

Beaver wants to edit his own past, to make sure that an authorized version survives him. Alix is slightly surprised that he should care about his posthumous reputation. It depresses her, to find vanity lurking in such a hulk. But she collaborates, because she is paid to do so. And because she is curious. And because she is, by now, involved. Beaver needs her, although he would never admit it. His rudeness, as she occasionally admits to herself, is in part an admission of that need.

Susie Enderby is appalled to find herself sitting in Fanny Kettle’s drawing-room. She cannot think how it has happened. She has been drawn here like an innocent bird by a hypnotic snake. Fanny Kettle’s protuberant, lascivious eyes stare at Susie Enderby.

Fanny is wearing green, dark green, in a shade traditionally favoured by those of her colouring, and she looks at once archaic and avant-garde. Her shoulders are padded, huge, soaring, as they had been at the evening of the Chamber of Commerce ball: her waist appears tiny, her legs are long and her long clinging skirt is carefully arranged to reveal a stretch of hard brown nylon shin. Susie, who takes a pride in her appearance and considers herself one of the best-dressed young professional wives of the region, suddenly feels herself to be a little dull, a little stocky. Fanny pours herself another cup of tea, her long fingers and crimson nails hovering over silver pot, china cup and saucer, sugar tongs. After all, it
is
only tea time, says Susie to herself, bracingly: nothing awful ever happens at tea time.

Fanny has been describing the reasons for her reappearance in Northam, after years of exile in the flat fens of the East Riding. She shudders with horror as she recalls the desolation. ‘I can’t tell you,’ she says, ‘how lonely it was, how isolated, how cut off from all social life of any sort . . . if you didn’t make an effort, you could speak to
nobody
, nobody at all, for
weeks on end
. Well,
days
on end. If it hadn’t been for my little trips abroad, my little trips to London, I’d have gone mad, quite mad.’

Susie wants to ask why on earth Fanny and her husband Ian had spent so long in such an out-of-the-way region, but she does not want to betray her ignorance. Fanny seems to expect Susie to know all about Ian Kettle’s work. She talks about him as though he were famous. As Susie has never heard of Ian Kettle, she has to tread warily, Gradually she pieces together the information that he has been on television, but is not a television personality: that he was vaguely connected with York University, and is now vaguely connected with the University of Northam: that he is, perhaps . . . yes, this must be it, and now it somehow begins to come back to Susie, as though she had known it all along, that’s right, he is some kind of archaeologist, who has spent years excavating burials in the wet dull flat eastern bits of the county . . . 

‘Of course, our house was rather grand, and that was a consolation,’ says Fanny. ‘We had house parties. Quite
famous
parties.’

Susie does not know whether to believe this or not, and slightly hopes it is not true. How could one have famous house parties in that damp wilderness?

‘Ian’s people are called the Parisi. I always thought that was a
hint
,’ said Fanny. ‘Parisian parties. You know.’ She insinuates.

Susie does not know. She has no idea what Fanny is talking about. Ian’s people? Parisian parties?

‘Yes, the house was good, but it was
too
far out . . . ’ Fanny sighs, looks round her new residence, which is a detached Victorian granite building high on the ridge by the university, in a suburb once fashionable, now slightly ‘mixed’. It is an area dominated by the great architectural fantasies of the fabulously wealthy nineteenth-century iron masters and by houses like this, the solid comfortable spacious houses of the solidly prosperous. ‘Now
this
house,’ says Fanny, ‘has some party potential, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?’

Susie nods, smiles. She is out of her depth. She herself sometimes gives little dinner parties for six or, eight, and a cocktail party once or twice a year. She’ considers herself, by Northam standards, a successful hostess. But is she? What new scale has Fanny Kettle introduced?

Fanny Kettle has a son of nearly seventeen. Susie expresses disbelief. ‘Yes, I can hardly believe it myself, such a big boy now . . . of course I married very young, with all the usual consequences . . . only twenty, I was.’ Fanny Kettle laughs. ‘I’m afraid poor Ian has found me rather a
handful
,’ she says, and laughs again, with display of teeth and rather gaunt neck.

Susie feels sorry for Ian Kettle. She thinks she has no recollection of him, from their one meeting—or was he perhaps that shadowy figure lurking at Fanny’s elbow?

Fanny inquires, formally, after Susie’s own children, without displaying much interest: Susie says she has two, William, aged eight, and Vicky, aged six. ‘How sensible you have been,’ says Fanny, as though sense were a commodity she mildly despised. To wait, to have them a little later, when one can afford more help . . . ’

‘Yes,’ says Susie, conscious that she has been emerging dully, uncompetitively from this interchange. ‘Yes, we
are
very fortunate, we’re very well placed now, and I have this excellent’—she hesitates over terminology—’this excellent
girl
 . . . a trained girl, you know—who lives in. So life is very agreeable.’

‘And you’re quite free, then? To do what you want?’

Fanny stares at Susie with her shockingly personal, investigative, unmannerly stare. Susie feels herself blushing, hopes her make-up will conceal the colour in her cheeks.

‘Yes,’ says Susie, firmly, primly (why does Fanny make her sound so smug, so prim, so suburban?), ‘yes, I do speech therapy at the clinic where I used to work, two half-days a week . . . and apart from that, yes, I am quite free.’

Free. The word hovers in the room, over the very slightly tarnished silver teapot, over the three-piece suite, over the coffee-table and the occasional tables, over the silk-fringed shades of the standard lamps. Free. An uneasy word, an uneasy concept, a confession, a concession. What has Susie surrendered? Something, she knows. Fanny has noted, has recorded, will exploit. Despite herself, Susie feels a faint tremor of excitement, a physical thrill, a stirring of the flesh. Fanny continues to chatter on, about her parties at Eastwold Grange, about her weekends in Paris, about her plans for future parties, about the complaisance of poor Ian . . . Susie does not know what to believe, does not know what is fact and what is fantasy, succumbs to a mild gin and tonic, refuses a second (‘I have to drive back’; ‘Ah, next time you
must
have a proper drink and go home in a taxi!’), and as she drives back through the waste land that links Northam and Hansborough, images of a strange, sinister, isolated Grange float into her mind, a Grange with brightly lit windows moated in mist. Laughter echoes into the surrounding emptiness, laughter on stairs and in bedrooms. Carnival, abandon, licence. Susie is outside, out on the flat grey mist-spangled lawn, looking in. Fanny, within, lies back on a brocaded settee, in a silken dress that parts to show the lace of her underskirt. Her head is thrown back. It is cold outside. Susie shivers and turns up the fan on her car heater, as she drives home to a solitary supper. Clive is out at a meeting, and the girl will have fed the children, will be waiting to go out with her boyfriend. Susie will eat eggs on toast in front of the television. Fanny’s ringed hand with its crimson nails reaches for a glass, and a high-heeled shoe drops from her thin hard ankle. A hand—an unattached, disembodied hand—reaches for Fanny’s lean thigh, beneath the silk.

Tony Kettle returns from an evening at the Bowens to find his mother lying snoring on the living-room settee. Her head is thrown back, and she snores, deeply, evenly, rhythmically. The television is still on, but it is soundless. The remote-control gadget has dropped from Fanny’s fingers and lies on the Persian rug by an empty bottle of Bulgarian Mountain Cabernet, an empty wineglass, an empty packet of cigarettes, an orange plastic cigarette lighter, and a stub-filled triangular Craven-A mock-antique ashtray. It is twenty to ten. Tony gazes at his mother with an indeterminate expression which accurately reflects his indeterminate feelings, then watches for a while the muted but loquacious participants in an incestuous BBC Answerback free-for-all about the alleged obscenity of a recent drama series. Tony does not know whether to creep quietly upstairs, like a prudent coward, or whether to attempt to wake his mother and persuade her to go to bed too. His father is away at a conference, so it doesn’t really matter if she lies there all night, or until (which is more probable) she rouses herself in the small hours, makes herself a cup of tea, and then puts herself to bed.

He wanders into the kitchen to think things over. He has had a pleasant evening with his friend Sam and Sam’s parents. Tony had not met Alix and Brian Bowen before. Alix did not seem the kind of mother that one would find lying asleep on a settee with an empty bottle of wine, but she was by no means unalarming: her wild grey hair, her piercing blue eyes, her intent concentration on everything one said, her large gestures, her sudden exclamations over forgotten parsley sauce, all these things had been slightly disconcerting. She seemed of a different generation from Tony’s mother, but Tony was used to that: most mothers belonged to an older generation than his own freakish darling. Most mothers, in Northam as in Ogham, seemed more reliable, more capable, more regular, more
dull
than Fanny Kettle. But Alix had not been dull: she had been full of talk, full of questions, full of enthusiasms. She had been particularly interested and indeed well informed about Tony’s father’s recent dig. She knew about chariot burials and Romans.

Sam Bowen claimed that she was obsessed by a murderer in Porston Prison, and Tony Kettle had waited eagerly for evidence of this, but none had emerged.

Instead, Alix over the fish pie had talked of the finds at Wetwang, the burials at Eastwold. She was fascinated to learn that the Kettles had actually lived at Eastwold, practically on the site, as it were. She wanted to know what it was like living at Eastwold Grange, how he had found the social life of Ogham, whether she ought to go and visit the ruins of Ogham Abbey. She expressed a polite desire to meet the Kettle parents.

Tony had drunk a glass of white wine with his supper. There wasn’t any pudding.

‘I’m afraid I never make puddings,’ said Alix, as though this deficiency had newly occurred to her. ‘I don’t know why, but I never do.’

Brian Bowen, Sam’s father, had showed less interest in ar
chaeology, but equal interest in Tony’s impressions of social life in East and South Yorkshire. Brian worked, Tony gathered, for fhe Education Department of Northam City Council. He wanted to know what Tony thought about sixth form colleges, how many kids had gone on to do A-Levels at Ogham, that kind of thing.

‘Your parents didn’t think of boarding-school?’ he asked, at one point.

‘I wouldn’t go,’ said Tony. ‘They suggested it, but I would stay at home.’ He laughed, a little uncomfortable at being the centre of so much attention. ‘Really boring it was, but I would stay.’ He paused, took another sip of wine, continued boldly, ‘But they took me around, you know. I didn’t spend all my youth in the sticks, as Sam likes to think. I went around with my mother. To London. And Paris. And Venice. Places like that.’

‘How nice,’ said Alix; thinking, what an odd boy, what can his parents have been up to?

Tony Kettle, standing irresolute an hour later in the vast high-ceilinged kitchen of the new Kettle residence, wonders the same thing. And wonders if Brian and Alix are
normal
parents, or whether there are no such creatures as normal parents? And if there were, would he want them for his own? He shrugs. He doubts it. He will take life as it is. What choice is there, after all?

He returns to the living-room, quietly removes the glass, the bottle and the ashtray, and slowly, sneakily, from the far end of the room, increases the volume of sound on the television. His mother stirs, mumbles, suddenly sits bolt upright, as Tony backs out of the door and makes his escape up the stairs.

Attractive danger. Natural curiosity. Unnatural curiosity. Charles Headleand cannot resist pursuing a visa for Baldai, Alix Bowen cannot resist travelling to see her murderer across the lonely moor, Susie Enderby cannot resist returning to take tea with Fanny Kettle, Janice Enderby cannot resist inviting people to dinner and Liz Headleand will not be able to resist an invitation to appear in a contentious debate on television. Their friend Stephen Cox has been unable to resist one of the challenges of the century, the secretive Pol Pot, hiding in his lair, at the end of the Shining Path.

Cliff Harper’s approach to the cliff edge of danger is less voluntary. He does not have an illusion of freedom. He has been struggling for years to prevent himself from reaching this precipice. He lies awake at night, adding up columns of figures, counting his creditors. He lacks the gift of self-deception, the Micawber touch which might have got him out of this mess. His partner Jim Bakewell blames him for lack of confidence. ‘You’ve got to think positive,’ Jim is—or was—fond of saying.

Cliff thinks that is all beside the point. Figures are what count, not faith.

His relationship with Jim deteriorates, almost as dramatically as the non-contractual relationship between Jim’s wife Yvonne and Cliff’s wife Shirley has done. These two women cannot stand one another. The origins of their mutual dislike are lost in history, though there is some remembered legend about a rejected piece of lemon meringue pie. It is known that Yvonne thinks Shirley gets ‘above herself’, ‘thinks a lot of herself’, ‘thinks she’s too good for this world’. ‘Who does she think she is?’ is the phrase that springs most frequently to Yvonne’s lips, when speaking of Shirley. Shirley, for her part, cannot forget or forgive a remark Yvonne once made about Shirley’s mother and the virtual seclusion in which Shirley’s mother chose to live. Cliff and Jim, for years, attempted to mediate, and then to keep the women apart, but rancour persisted, and has now flooded into their own friendship. ‘What did I tell you?’ is now Yvonne’s refrain.