The Witch of Exmoor (11 page)

Yes, Frieda Haxby had grown fond of Christina, who preferred flat men's shoes and short jackets to white silk, who loved the storm and feared the calm, yet who ended her days peacefully chewing chestnuts with the cook in her Roman kitchen. Occasionally, of a night, when the wind blows (and here it can blow) she fancies she hears the strains of Scarlatti and the clear pure voices of Angelica Giorgini and her sister Barbara, as they sing to the old queen amidst the scent of jasmine.
Sehnsucht nach Süde, Sehnsucht nach Norde.

As it happens, Frieda Haxby can hear Scarlatti whenever she chooses. The Giorgini sisters and Christina are three centuries dead, but Frieda has Scarlatti on compact disc.

The mortal remains and documentary leavings of Gladys and Ernie Haxby are, in contrast to those of Queen Christina, sparse. Ernest Haxby had been cremated, with a minimum of ceremony; the indifferent functionary had, to Gladys's indignation, got Ernie's name wrong. He had gone to his long home under the name of Edward Haxby. And he hadn't been allowed the hymn he'd always wanted either: he'd often spoken in praise of ‘We plough the fields and scatter', but Gladys and the functionary were agreed that this was a harvest hymn and unsuitable for a spring send-off. God alone knows what Gladys had done with Ernie's ashes, but Frieda herself had broadcast those of the mother in the small garden at Chapel Street, amongst the seeding cabbages. She had dug them in with a trowel and stamped on them with a Wellington boot. The cottage had been sold. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to write her memoirs in her birthplace, but Frieda had not been able to face such flat psychic hardship. She prefers it here, by the sea. But she has brought boxes of papers, and those she will, in her own good time, if she can bear it, examine.

Is this desire to write her memoirs a desire for revenge, or a desire to salvage her own self? She is not sure.

She remembers one of her last visits to her mother, in Dry Bendish. Herself a woman in her late fifties, her mother in her late seventies, in fair health but poor spirits. Ernie was long dead, dead of a series of strokes brought on by overwork: he had been the deferential farm labourer, cap in hand, put upon by all and sundry. Whereas Gladys, as she had frequently remarked, thought herself equal to the best in the land. ‘Put upon by all and sundry', ‘equal to the best in the land'. This had been the ditty, this the refrain, spun out remorselessly over the decades. Frieda stands there, in the small hot room that smells of hair, dust, mice and stale biscuits. Her mother talks and talks. Frieda, the tea-tray in her hand, the door ajar, is awash with tea. She is longing to go to the lavatory, her bladder is weak and grows weaker with age. This time Gladys defeats her. Frieda, standing listening to her mother, transfixed by the unceasing flow of complaints about a husband dead, neighbours disloyal, shopkeepers dishonest and life disappointing, finds that she has wet her knickers. Warm wet urine seeps through her black John Lewis elastic knickers and her black fifteen-denier cornershop tights. Urine runs down her thigh. Desperately Frieda tightens her pelvic muscles, arrests the stream. But her mother's flow continues. Gladys had boasted, still boasts, that her babies were dry by the age of one, but Frieda knows that this was a he. Frieda is not dry yet. A 5 5-year-old professional woman bullied into incontinence in a reversal of roles, in a perverse and sadistic seizure of power. Does her mother know what she has done? Does she know of this hidden humiliation? Please, Miss, please Miss Haxby, may I be excused?

Well, she had escaped from Dry Bendish to the sea's edge and this deluge. Will the rain never stop? It cannot, she thinks, pour down so heavily for much longer. All the waters of the western sky have gathered over the high wet land of the moor and have been sucked down to discharge themselves upon its black bosom and upon its upland bogs, upon its clefts and gullies. There is some movement in the darkness and it must lighten soon. Yet still the force of the downpour makes the great drops splash and break on the cracked paving. They rise again into little round fountains, some inches high.

She and her sister Hilda had called these special effects of deluge ‘fairy fountains'. No, she corrects herself, not fairy fountains. ‘Fairy crowns'. Little coronets of rain-pearls and rain-diamonds. Such an imagination, Hilda had had. That is what the adults used to say.

Can she nail Vampire Hilda, can she drive a stake through her undead greedy pulsing heart?

What can Frieda care for reputation? The last infirmity of noble minds. She is past all that, beyond, washed up. This at least even the utterly self-centred Rosemary must have observed. Why bother to set right the record for those one despises? Let them sink in their own mire. And sink they will, in the sucking mud of meatless burgers, drifting garbage, false coinage, hot vomit, corruption, greed, triviality. Scrambling for lottery tickets, selling one another bad dreams and ersatz merchandise and junk talk and fake labels. Sometimes Frieda thinks it is what they have done to the language itself that has driven her out of reach of her fellow countrymen and women. She had never considered herself a warrior in the battle for pure English, not wishing to ally herself with the High Anglicans, old-fashioned novelists, Oxbridge pedants, failed publishers and sacked editors whom that cause seemed to attract, but of late her recoil from what she heard over the airwaves, what she read in the press, what she received through the post had become so violent that she had found herself moving towards their ranks. Better here alone than make common cause with such dubious friends. There are no common causes left. Each for herself alone.

In her last days at Romley she had listened to the sounds of the city, to the wailing and bleeping of grief and pain and crime, to the waves of the sky vibrating with jumbo and chopper, to the ground beneath her house rumbling with tube and tunnel and drill and screw. And from the radio had spewed words that no sane society could ever coin. Offwat, Offtel, Offsted, Offthis, Offthat. Everything had gone Off, like bad meat. How had these sounds globbed up from the pure well of language undefiled into the tongue that Shakespeare spoke? Even her local library now labels books as Goo and foo, as ROM and his and pap. Gristle, fat, chicken scraps and water from cows' heads. The Trading Standards chief in Taunton had told her that the chicken carcasses are put in a huge metal container and pressurized until the tatters of flesh left on the bones begin to melt and flow. This excretion is squeezed through the machine's orifices, collected, reconstituted. This we devour,
GOO, FEE, FI, FO, FUM
. Our great post-war civilization.

Once–indeed, only yesterday–this rotting world had fascinated her, and she had done her best to investigate it, to squeeze it till it flowed. But something has snapped in her. So here she sits, a queen in abdication, a queen in exile, a queen at the water's edge, an old woman with bad teeth and a weak bladder. They will not ask her back and she does not care. She has had her time. The wells are poisoned now. Even here, the poison seeps. It flows down the channel from the nuclear-power station, and the fishermen catch dogfish with two heads, mackerel that grow legs, lobsters that glow in the dark. Or so they say in the Wreckers' Arms.

She can see the far northern shore, for the air is clearing now. Across the channel in earlier centuries came Welsh coal for the lime kilns of this acid earth, and from the west came contraband from further afield–wines, lace, brandy, decorated steel blades from Toledo. The illegal trade continues, for today bales of marijuana are washed up on the beach. On fine days Frieda can see the pillar of smoke and the plume of flame and the giant's building blocks and towers of the steel-factory-turned-chemical-plant of Aberary. It rises like an enchanted palace. At night yellow lights bead the shore, and the single white eye of the sleepless lighthouse blinks. Freighters and tankers slowly pass. She watches them through her binoculars. She can see further now than when she was younger. She needs glasses to read, but her long vision improves. She does not always like what she sees.

She does not miss London. She does not miss company. She has had too much company. Her early years had been too thin and clear, too static, too flat, and to escape them she had thrown herself into turbulence, as soon as her children released her–and somewhat sooner, in their view. Her middle age had been restless, it had whirled her from project to project, from continent to continent, from bed to bed. Now she wishes to be alone.

Her feet are warmer now. She looks at them with muted favour. She has an ingrowing toenail on the big toe of her right foot which has troubled her all her life. She can see that if she survives into an advanced old age it will become a problem. On her left leg she has a large scar, which she now examines with interest, for it occurs to her that it is one of the few visible messages preserved from her girlhood. It dates from the day that her sister Everhilda Haxby had tried to kill her. Although much faded, it is still prominent. For years she had entered it in her many paged, richly stamped passports and in other documents, under sections headed ‘Special Features' or ‘Distinguishing Characteristics', until she had realized in the early 1980s that in these days of black boxes and instant incineration a scar, however historic and impressive, would not survive death. She had then taken to entering her dental bridgework. But not many countries ask for such details these days. We are all on computer, or expendable: who can tell which?

(On one of her academic jaunts abroad, in the 1960s, she had woken from heavy sleep to find her lover departed and her passport lying on the hotel bedside table, defaced: he had added to the admitted distinguishing feature of her thigh-scar, in indelible biro, the additional qualities of ‘
PARANOIA AND INTRANSIGENCE
'.)

The scar is important to Frieda. It will appear in her memoirs. It marks the day when Hilda Haxby had tried to kill her little sister Frieda in the old mill by the river.

Frieda now accepts this attempted murder as a fact. She would stand up for it in a court of law. She has forgotten that this interpretation of that long-long-ago incident is very recent. It had come upon her when she was in her forties, and then only at the prompting of an analyst. The analyst had not been analysing Frieda Haxby: they had met quite by chance at a private view of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Warming white wine in hand, crumbling puff pastry dusting their suit jackets, they had been speaking of sibling slaughter, a topic prompted by portraits of Bloody Mary, Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots. Bloody Mary, her round cheeks girlish and smug, grimly and firmly clutches a rose and a pair of gloves; Lady Jane nervously fingers her own fingers; Scottish Mary rests her hand beneath her right breast above her rosary; and victorious Elizabeth Gloriana dazzles in many poses with ruff and fan and jewels and brocade. Rivalries, hatreds, treacheries gleam from their stiff bodices, their hard bold eyes. And as the analyst spoke of the murderous passions engendered by heritage and court, it became clear to Frieda, in one of those flashes that come only once or twice in a lifetime, that the ladder had not shaken of its own accord. Hilda had tried to kill her, and all had followed on from that.

‘What do you think, bird?' Frieda asks the pigeon. It rattles its saucepan lid in response, and cocks its head at her with a look of pure questioning intelligence. She gazes at it with affection. Its red-rimmed eyes pierce, its iridescent blue-green bright breast feathers gleam. Like the dog, Bounce, it has adopted her. At first she tried to chase it away, following her London-dweller's instinctive dislike of this verminous and greedy species, but the bird had persisted, retreating from her waving arms only to advance yet again and again, until she let it into her house, to sit with her. She admires it, she is sorry she tried to reject it. It is slightly lame, and had flown in with a message on its leg. She does not think the message is for her, and does not know how to open the little capsule. Let it keep its message, the message can wait. Now she and the bird are friends. It is brighter than Bounce. It likes to sit in the saucepan lid. She does not know why. Perhaps it reminds it of something in its former life.

Her own former life lies around her in untidy profusion. She must make a thorough search, one of these days, for her parents' marriage certificate. She is sure she had seen it once, amidst the debris she had carried with her from the cottage after her mother's death. She had made only the most desultory attempt to trace her own ancestry through birth and death certificates at St Catherine's House on the Aldwych, for the atmosphere of the building had appalled her–had such places been as disagreeable as this in the old days, when she had worked at Somerset House herself, before she had been able to delegate such tedious work to research assistants? The smell of anoraks and damp jerseys, the slamming of heavy ledgers, the jostling and poking, the muttered consultations, the crush, the queues, the discomfort, the despair. Every twenty minutes the inevitability of theft had been ritually proclaimed. What could these poor wretches have that would be worth the stealing? Who would want their plastic bags and their stubby umbrellas? Their miserable plough-pushing grandparents, their unmarried mothers?

The sight of her own name in the ledger had made her feel slightly sick. Born at 56 Chapel Street, Dry Bendish. Looking for her sister Everhilda and her mother Gladys had been more than she could face. She had chickened out and run away. She would write a record without records. Her last testament.

She will stick it out here. Maybe they will try to come and get her, those devoted children of hers, and carry her off in a straitjacket. Certify her, section her, lock her up and feed her by force. She must patrol her defences, when the rain clears.

 

Let us return to Hampshire, for it is still wet on Exmoor, and Frieda, although she has been an adventuress in her time, has become a bit of a bore. She does nothing but brood balefully on the past. She dreams too much, and takes her dreams too seriously. She is not good company. She makes little effort to entertain. Her mother and her sister are dead, but she will not let them rest in their graves. There is no reason why we should watch with her. We can take her in small doses. We will leave her by her paraffin stove amidst the paraphernalia of her necromantic arts, as the deluge gutters and dies, as she wonders whether to go down at low tide to hammer some radioactive mussels and winkles from the rocks of the shore for her evening meal. No wonder she is losing weight. But she likes mussels, and is happy to gleam, phosphorescent, into what is left of eternity.