The Witch of Exmoor (2 page)

‘The odds against that', says her father, ‘are about sixty million to one.'

‘So you admit', says Emily, ‘that there's no justice–no justification–for our living in this house?'

‘None whatsoever,' says Daniel. ‘I gave up any hope of any kind of genera] social justice years and years ago. What I have, I hold. That's my motto.'

‘It's a pity', says Simon, ‘that we can't set up a controlled experiment. Let David work out what he thinks would be really fair–and then try it for just a year. Then we could press another button and all scamper back home. If we didn't like it. Which I don't suppose most of us here would.'

‘You might die in the experiment. A year's a long time,' says Emily. ‘You might die in real life,' says Simon. His tone is not friendly.

‘If there were a button,' says Rosemary, ‘would you wake up in this new world at the same age as you were when you pressed it? Or might you find yourself a newborn baby, or an old person in a geriatric ward? Does the original position make us all the same age, or not?'

‘I think you're taking it too literally,' says David, momentarily distracted by the Elgin Marbles, the concept of historical property, and the sugar canes of Guyana. ‘It's only a philosophical concept. A hypothesis. There isn't any button.'

‘I take everything literally,' says Rosemary, ‘even philosophy.'

‘And would you wake up', asks Simon, refusing to be diverted, ‘with all the memories of a person who had been brought up in the new society? Would they have been implanted, like in that robot movie? So that you could remember nothing else?'

‘You would wake up', says David, teasingly, impressively, ‘with the memories of a person who has been born into and lived in a society run on the principles of fairness and justice.'

‘Wow!' says Emily. ‘That is science fiction.'

‘Well,' says easy-going Nathan, ‘you can count on me to press your button. Any old button. I'd give it a whirl. I can't be bothered to do the redesigning from the first principles bit myself. I'll leave that to the professionals. I'll leave it to my distinguished brother-in-law. I think I can trust him not to introduce a tyranny or a totalitarian state or an elective monarchy or the murder of the first-born or the culling of anyone whose first name begins with an N. I'll just take my chance with whatever David and his chums suggest. The odds are I'd end up being someone much nicer than me in an even nicer place. I'd take a gamble.'

‘He's a
terrible
gambler,' says Rosemary, leaning over proudly to pat his hairy hand. ‘You should have seen him in the casino at Venice. All his chips on the table.'

‘Really?' says Patsy. ‘I'm surprised. You are a dark horse, Nathan.'

‘I like dark horses and long odds,' says Nathan. ‘And poker, and backgammon. But I don't get much time for them these days. Rosie doesn't like it, do you, Rosie?'

Husband and wife smile at one another, in not quite convincing collusion. Nathan takes his hand away from Rosemary's, and fishes in his pocket for a crumpled packet of cigarettes.

‘Do you mind, Patsy?' he asks. ‘I'll go in to the garden if you like.'

Patsy shakes her head, and reaches behind to the dresser for a saucer to serve as an ashtray.

‘Smoking is gambling,' says Emily, staring coolly at her uncle. ‘It's just a question of luck.'

‘A question of luck as to when or whether I develop the fatal cough? Yes, I suppose you're right.'

‘In the just society,' asks Emily, turning back to David, ‘would there be any smoking areas? Or would it be altogether forbidden? Would there be sexual reproduction? Would there be illness and death?'

‘Smoking areas could be agreed. Or not. But the other things would have to carry on as now, I'm afraid. Otherwise you would end up with a society without anything recognizable as human beings at all.'

‘How nice,' says Emily, still staring hard at David.

‘That might be the only way,' says Simon. ‘You could devise this perfectly just system, but then human beings would come along and mess it all up. Much better to redesign the human beings.'

‘What a gloomy couple you are,' says David, smiling his charming televisual smile.

‘I'm
not gloomy,' says Emily. ‘Simon may be, but I'm not. I'm just being radical. I mean you might as well go back to the original plan. If you're going to have an original position, it might as well be
really
original.'

David is not sure whether she is being quite clever or very stupid. The evening grows late: surely it is time these teenagers went to bed? His own son had politely vanished hours ago, like the good boy he is.

‘A society without human beings', says Daniel gravely,
‘is
a radical concept.' Patsy permits herself to snigger.

‘A society without human beings', says Gogo, breaking her silence, ‘is exactly what
she
seems to have designed for herself.'

Nathan and David and Patsy quickly exchange guilty glances: so the game of Unhappy Families is back upon the table. David has done his best to distract, but he has failed. The Palmers are relentless. They could bring any topic home. They could lasso conversations about gardening, or the cinema, or the Hubble telescope, or the sugar industry, or Guyanese politics, or the slave-trade, and bring them home to graze about their mother.

‘I mean, for God's sake,' says Gogo. A long pause follows. She has the floor. ‘The Witch of Exmoor,' she says, echoing a phrase that Rosemary has tried out on her over their picnic lunch on the lawn.

‘It just isn't habitable,' continues Rosemary. ‘She can't go on living there. At her age. It's impossible. We all thought the Mausoleum was bad enough. This is a thousand times worse. At least the Mausoleum was in reach of public transport. Well, almost. I think Daniel ought to go and have a look. Show a bit of masculine authority.'

Daniel smiles his thin, dry, bleached smile. His spare face is briefly irradiated by a sad, mocking, uncertain light. His sisters mocked him much.

‘Describe it again, Rosie,' he says. He enjoys her recital. He might as well take pleasure from it.

‘
Well'
says Rosemary. ‘To begin with, it's vast. And it's hideous. And it's uninhabitable. And what electricity there is keeps going off. And it's about to fall into the sea.'

‘It's literally on the
edge
of the sea?'

‘On the very edge. Perched. And the drive–well, you can't really call it a drive. It's hardly even a track. It's more or less impassable. Deep ruts. Great pot-holes. Stuff growing out of the hedges. It was bad enough getting down it in the spring. God knows what it's like in winter. And it's four hours from London even if you put your foot down all the way along the motorway. And then all those miles over the moor. There's a sign, written on a piece of cardboard. I stopped to read it. It said
BEWARE OF VIPERS BREEDING.
'

It is the first time they have heard this detail: they respond with suitable admiration.

‘Did it mean it literally? Vipers, literally vipers?'

‘I should think so! It looked real snake country to me. You could feel them round about. You know, roots and bracken. I don't know what she thinks she's doing there. She's got no connection with that part of the country at all. If she wants to go native why doesn't she go back to Lincolnshire where she says she came from? Or Sweden, come to that?'

‘She always said she wanted to live in the country,' says Daniel.

‘Yes, but why choose Exmoor? It can't mean anything to her.'

‘Hampshire means nothing to me,' says Daniel. ‘But I happen to like it here. I don't see why she shouldn't live on Exmoor if she wants.'

‘In a derelict hotel?'

‘I thought you said it was a folly.'

‘It's hard to know what it is. It's enormous. She only lives in a bit of it.'

‘And it's a four-hour drive?'

‘At least. It was just over 200 miles on the clock, but the last 60 are a nightmare. And I can tell you it's not very nice to drive for four hours and then have the door more or less slammed in your face.'

Daniel and Gogo like this bit best.

‘So she didn't want you to come in?'

‘Not really. She kept me out there in this terrible overgrown courtyard. Netties everywhere. And it was pissing with rain. She had her back to the door as though she was guarding something. I had to say I was dying for a pee before she'd let me in. And then she said, why didn't you stop a bit earlier and pee in the hedge?'

They all laugh at this sally, and not for the first time.

‘What was the lavatory like?' inquires Emily, freshly.

‘Well, it was clean. But sort of basic. No lavatory
seat,
for example. Nothing extra. Except spiders. Those long leggy ones. Lots of them-'

‘Her familiars,' says Gogo.

‘No pot plants, no toilet rolls, no little cane tables, no volumes of verse?'

‘There was a toilet roll, but God it was damp. The damp there is a killer.'

‘And she gave you a slice of corned beef,' prompts Gogo.

‘Yes, a slice of corned beef. And a piece of soggy Ryvita. It tasted a thousand years old. There's a cold like mildew down there. It bites. It's full of microbes. Full of fungus spores. It fills the lungs. I can't describe how horribly cold it was. And this was mid-May.'

‘She wasn't expecting you,' ventures Patsy in extenuation.

‘How could she be expecting anyone if she won't have a telephone?' returns Rosemary.

‘Perhaps she really doesn't want to see us,' says Daniel. (This is the kind of thing he says.)

‘Well,' says Rosemary, with gravitas, ‘that would seem to be the message. She says she doesn't want to see anyone. She says she's too busy. I said busy doing what, and she said she was busy being a recluse. She said it was a full-time job.'

They all laugh, and there is a respect in their laughter, for Frieda has turned the tables on them this time. They are surrounded by friends who complain at length of the burden of visiting their aged relatives, their aunts with Alzheimer's, their fathers grumpy with cancer or heart conditions or gout, their mothers whining of the treacheries of the past: none of them has a mother who does not want to see them. It is against the natural order. What have they done to earn such rejection? Frieda has removed herself from their concern and set off into the unknown. They had seen trouble coming a year or more ago, when she suddenly decided to sell the family home and all that was in it, but they had not expected a removal as dramatic as this. She had sold the big house in Romley (optimistically and falsely described by the estate agents as ‘on the borders of Stoke Newington') and purchased a dilapidated thirty-room Victorian castle by the sea.

‘But you said she looked well enough,' says Daniel.

‘Oh, yes, she
looks
well enough. I think she's lost weight. Well, one would, on a diet like that. Worse than a health farm. God knows where the nearest shop is.'

‘I don't see how we can intervene,' says Daniel, who has no wish to be sent off to Exmoor as family delegate. ‘She's not doing any harm up there, is she?'

‘Not to us,' says Gogo. ‘She can't harm us any more. She's done her worst.'

‘I wouldn't be so sure,' says Daniel, rethinking his position as a new light strikes him. ‘She's only in her sixties.'

‘I'm not so sure either,' says Rosemary. ‘I told you what she said about remaking her will? She said she was going to reallocate her posthumous copyrights. Is she allowed to do that?'

‘Of course she is,' says David D'Anger, roused by this brazen assertion of family rights of interest in family money. ‘She can do what she wants with them.'

The three Palmers turn their eyes upon him, the dark intruder.

‘Perhaps yon'd better go and see her and find out what she's really up to,' says Rosemary. ‘She'd listen to you, David. She favours you.'

‘I'd go,' says David. ‘I'd go, in the autumn. If you thought it was a good idea.'

His ready acquiescence both pleases and disquiets them. What does David D'Anger hope to gain from a trip to the West Country? There can be nothing to interest him there. Westminster, the West Indies and West Yorkshire, fair enough, he has interests in all of those–but the West Country, surely not?

‘You won't like it there,' says Rosemary. ‘You should have seen her face, when she saw me getting out of the car. You may laugh, but it wasn't very funny.'

‘I'm not laughing,' says Daniel.

‘Neither am I,' says Gogo.

‘It's no laughing matter,' says Rosemary.

‘Money
is
money,' says Nathan solemnly, provocatively. ‘You don't want her leaving it all to pay off the National Debt, do you?'

‘I'm telling you,' says Rosemary, ‘that building's like a black hole. You don't believe me. It's worse than any of you imagine. It'll probably slide down the cliff and into the sea. And then where will we be?'

Although it is no laughing matter, the thought of their mother sliding into the sea, on a dark night, has its comic aspects. They elaborate, and I am sorry to say that they laugh. And, in conclusion, it is agreed that David and Gogo, come the autumn, will risk the journey and the mildew and the corned beef. They will take Benjamin as peacemaker, they volunteer. How will she be able to alienate herself and her fortune from her own children and grandchildren? (If Daniel and Rosemary have suspicions about this plan, they keep them to themselves.)

 

Upstairs, in the bunk room, the youngest of those grandchildren, Jessica and Jonathan Herz, are playing with the fast-forward button on one of the house's several video machines. They are trying to find the bit with the child-eating zombies, but they are not trying very seriously: they are waiting, in a state of heightened excitement, for their cousin Benjamin D'Anger to come back from his bedroom with the Game. Many a video nasty have they watched up there in the nursery for their aunt Patsy Palmer has a professional interest in video nasties and no interest whatsoever in domestic censorship. But none of the videos is anything like as frightening, exciting, wicked and seductive as the Power Game. Jessica and Jon love coming to stay with Uncle Daniel and Aunt Patsy at the Old Farm when Ben is there, for Ben invented the Power Game and they cannot play it without him. He is the Master of the Game, and they wait for him in a slightly fevered anticipation. Will it be as exciting as it was last time? Will Ben let them change roles this time? Will he have made up more of the story as he promised? He has been mysterious about it all day, for it is a late and secret game, and it has to wait for a certain hour of the night–tonight he had dictated that it should be ten thirty. The minutes have flicked by on the video clock, and now they wait, sitting on the floor in their pyjamas, round the space they have cleared. (They have built a wall of video boxes, in preparation. It is the city wall.)