The Witch of Exmoor (22 page)

Will is at a loss. Shall he enter the house and track her down, noisily announcing his presence as he goes? Would that count as trespass, as breaking and entering? Is it illegal to walk through an open door? He decides it would be wiser to approach from the garden side. And so it is that Will, closely followed by Bounce, finds himself crossing the expanse of tufted grass that was once a lawn, towards the window where Frieda Haxby sits. And still she does not look up.

He is obliged to tap upon the window.

Frieda looks up, sharply: so she is not deaf.

She sees a young dark handsome elfin stranger with a bare short-cropped head, an earring and a carpet bag, wearing a denim jacket and a white T-shirt bearing some half-concealed slogan. He is tapping at her window-pane.

She certainly does not look afraid, notes Will nervously: she looks furious. There may have been a passing flicker of alarm, but it is replaced by a glower of angry and haughty indignation, the sort of expression that middle-class people reserve for beggars and travelling salesmen selling ironing-board covers and yellow dusters and absorbent floor cloths made of industrial shoddy. Maybe she thinks he
is
a travelling salesman?

He mouths at her, through the glass: ‘Are you Mrs Haxby?'

Her expression changes from defensive contempt to a wary wrath: this, she decides, is some mad fan, come all the way to Ashcombe to annoy her. But she crosses to the window, opens one of its large damp-swollen wet-rot reluctant panes, and stares down at him as he stands below her on the sunken lawn. There, with him, stands Bounce, bowing and grinning, putting in a mute plea for this luckless companion in misfortune.

‘Mrs Haxby?' says Will, in his utterly distinctive Black Country nasal twang.

‘Miss
Haxby, in point of fact,' says Frieda, ever pedantic, standing on ceremony. ‘Or
Mrs
Palmer. If you prefer. What can I do for you?'

Will Paine coughs, clears his throat. ‘I wondered –I just wondered–if there's any work going?'

This question seems to annoy her. ‘Of course there isn't,' she snaps. ‘Whatever kind of work would I need, down here?'

Will stares around him. It seems evident to him that a lot needs doing. There had been a lot to do at Patsy Palmer's, and her place had been as neat as the Archbishop of York's compared with this wilderness.

She is about to show him the door, and he hasn't even got in yet. The thought of climbing that fucking great mountain back to the A39 brings sweat to his brow and a lump to his throat. He tries again.

‘I'm a friend of your grandson Simon. And of Emily,' he says, stretching a point or two.

He has her attention now. ‘Oh, are you?' she says, relenting slightly.

‘I spent a bit of time in the sunyner with them,' he embroiders. ‘Oh, God,' says Frieda. ‘I suppose you'd better come in.'

‘How do I get in?' he asks.

The scene is ridiculous.

‘Oh, I'll come and get you,' she says. ‘You stay where you are.'

And he stands there, patting Bounce hopefully, until she appears, round the corner of the building. The sun has sunk behind the hill, and the air grows colder.

She lets him in. She offers him a whisky. He declines. She makes him a cup of tea. He does not much like tea, but he accepts, out of politeness. She offers him a £20 note. She wants him to go away. She wants to be alone.

‘Nobody ever gets this far,' she says, as he drinks his tea. ‘You gave me a fright, knocking on the window like that. Nobody's ever been here except the Jehovah's Witnesses. They made it. You have to admire them, don't you?'

‘I'm not a Jehovah's Witness,' he says. He pauses, tries again. ‘I'm sorry,' he says. ‘I didn't mean to intrude. I just thought you might have some odd jobs.'

‘I like to be alone,' says Frieda.

‘And I thought I ought to tell you about Simon,' says Will, improvising.

‘What about Simon?'

‘He's not well,' says Will, in a tone of pity and censure. ‘He's on crack. And worse. He's cracking up.'

‘Oh, is he?' says Frieda, taking another swig of her stiff whisky. ‘Well, that'll teach him a thing or two. And how's little Emily?'

‘Emily's OK, so far,' says Will cautiously.

‘What do you mean, so far?'

Will shakes his head and says nothing.

‘So social worker Patsy took you in, did she? And then she kicked you out? Well, she's bigger-hearted than me. I'm not even going to take you in.'

Will Paine looks forlorn, and sniffs. He reaches for his bag. The dog, seeing the defeated movement, whines in sympathy. The homeless homing pigeon rattles its tin lid.

Frieda concedes.

‘Oh, all right,' she says. ‘Just one night, mind you, and off with the dawn. And don't bother me. You're not to bother me. I'm not much of a one for conversation. I like my own company.'

Will smiles, his face irradiated. He's a very nice-looking boy.

‘Just a bed for the night,' he says. He knows he is in with a chance. He's very good at not being a nuisance. Or so he thinks.

Autumn advances, and a date for the next election is mooted. It will be in the spring. David D'Anger pays many visits to his dentist and works overtime. He is ubiquitous. His party pledges this and unpledges that. David speaks on social justice and race relations and the food industry here, there and everywhere. He even speaks on social justice and race relations in Middleton. Gogo D'Anger continues to study the neurological conditions of an increasing number of customers and to complain about the decreasing funding of the National Health Service. Her private practice grows. She and David D'Anger ensure their own health privately and at some expense. David finds he cannot insure his teeth. As he doesn't in principle approve of insurance, this pleases him. But it doesn't please him very much.

Benjamin D'Anger studies the causes of the Second World War and writes an essay on the Romantic poets and opts to take geology as a subsidiary subject. He draws crystals and synclines and anticlines and lies at the bottom of the bath each night in deep water, seeing how long he can hold his breath. His breath control improves.

Patsy Palmer surprises herself by finding she is obliged to view a porno video which makes her feel slightly uneasy. She had thought she was past such niceties. She also surprises herself by finding herself in bed with a chap from the Home Office. She can't think how it happened. She hopes Daniel Palmer will not notice. He does not. Daniel Palmer is involved in a protracted case concerning pollution in the River Wash, a river which flows through South Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and some of Cheshire. Nobody seems to want to claim it, but somebody will have to.

Little Emily Palmer is far away in Italy, where she is, in principle, learning Italian in Florence; in practice she is hanging out, and very happy with it.

Simon Palmer is not so happy. He has bad dreams. He dreams of toads and crabs.

Nachan Herz dreams nightly of the white hand of Belle. She torments him by night and comforts him by day. He has never learnt to swim. He is afraid of deep water. Her white hand beckons him.

Rosemary Herz runs around too much to notice anything. She is busy working out lottery schemes, millennium schemes. The rapid triviality of her life is exhausting but it keeps her from thought. She has successfully numbed all introspection, all reflection. Her life glitters with surfaces. It has no darkness and no depth. This is the way she likes it.

They are all too busy to think much about Frieda Haxby, and have to be called back into line rather sharply by Cate Crowe.

 

Cate Crowe has been to the Film Festival in Lisbon. She had not attended this increasingly glamorous annual event in her capacity as literary agent, but in her new role as partner of Newbrit filmstar, Egg Benson. The Egg's new movie,
Crates of Ivory,
was being premiered, and Cate Crowe had dropped all at the office to accompany him. The Crowe was herself something of a glamour-figure, a
Vanity Fair
trader, and she felt quite at home amongst the stars and starlets. Famed for her ability to drive a hard bargain, and her Marlene Dietrich legs, she justified her trip by telling herself that somebody had to keep an eye on the high-earning Egg, who was given to intermittent bursts of spectacular misbehaviour, and by assuring her partners that she would keep her ear to the ground to see if any talent was zumming along down there.

Cate Crowe had never been to Portugal before, and she liked it. She particularly liked the hotel where she and the Egg were installed, high up in the hills at Sintra: palatial, enormous, and fit for royalty. Vast empty frescoed rooms ornately furnished and full of floral masterpieces led down to yet more vast empty frescoed rooms, and there late at night she and Egg would wander, astonished, like children in a fairy story, like dreamers in a
trompe-l'oeil
opium dream. Though both had struck the jackpot in life, neither had been reared in luxury, and this whole edifice seemed insubstantial, magical, like a filmset that would be dismantled at any moment before their eyes. Yet it was real. The marble was solid, but the space was not. Usually it's the other way round, as they both have discovered.

The films on show at the festival were not so easy on the eye, for the fashion of the year seemed to be for black humour, violence, decapitation, dismembering; cannibalism featured not only in the Egg's own movie but in several other pieces from small nationalist movements through Europe and beyond. There was a Scottish film of singular ferocity. (Cate Crowe had already seen this movie in London, and hadn't understood a word of its dialogue; the Portuguese subtitles were a great help, even though Cate couldn't speak Portuguese, and whoever wrote them deserved, as she said several times, an Oscar.) The Croatian and Romanian contributions were also on the cheerless side, and Cate resolved to play truant and skip the rest of the official programme, apart from the banquets and parties; she'd have one last shot, and condescend to attend the film about which everyone was talking. Then she'd take herself back to the real world of the Palacio in Sintra.

The buzz film of the year,
Dangerous Exchanges,
was scripted and made by a young, unknown, art-house Australian called Claudia Cazetti. It was a philosophic fiction about time travel, in which a group of characters was granted the opportunity of residence in any period of the pageant of history: they were invited to choose, then had to test the consequences of choice. The joke was that they all kept making silly mistakes like forgetting to specify what age or class or even what species they would belong to, and in the end they all got sick to death of their own stupidity and opted for the one remaining choice–to die, or to be reborn as themselves in exactly the spot they'd started from, the spot from which they'd been so keen co get away in the first place. This was Brisbane, 1996. (They all chose Brisbane rather than death: all but one.) Cate Crowe couldn't follow the intricacies of the plot, as she'd had several glasses of Portuguese red before settling down to the viewing, but she admired the costumes and the special effects, and was much taken with the performance of the principal actress, who played the Fairy Godmother in charge of the exchanges. This actress, as everyone had been saying, had star quality. She was cool, icy, intelligent, superior. She surveyed the panorama of history and the follies and littlenesses of man with a divine indifference. She was rumoured to be Cazetti's lover. She looked a bit like Greta Garbo.

It was when the name of Garbo surfaced in the sludge of Cate Crowe's memory that she remembered where she had seen the name of Claudia Cazetti. It wasn't just the sympathetic alliteration that made it seem familiar: it was Cazetti who had faxed her, months ago, about the film rights in Frieda Haxby's
Queen Christina.
Hadn't Garbo played Christina, a thousand years ago? Cate Crowe knew she'd better get hold of Cazetti. She'd better get hold of Haxby's book. There might be something in this after all.

Cate Crowe had never read her client's latest work, and had felt little need to do so. She hardly knew Frieda Haxby, whom she had inherited from Bertram Goldie, an older member of the firm, now retired. She had regarded Haxby as a sleeping investment, a quiet, steady-little-earner whose 10 per cent from those old classics,
The Matriarchy of War
,
The Scarecrow and the Plough
and
The Iron Coast,
was well worth harvesting, and whose lighter works (a heterogeneous mix of popular sociology and rogue political pamphleteering) had proved surprisingly resilient. But she hadn't read
Christina.
She'd read the reviews, and that had seemed more than enough. Maybe she'd been wrong?

It wasn't easy to get hold of a copy in Lisbon. Cate got on the phone to London and told her assistant to dig out the letter from Cazetti, and then set off in a taxi to scour the bookshops. After two hours of unsuccessful trawl, and risky parking, on tramlines and cobbled streets and precipices, her driver suggested the Biblioteca of the Instituto Británico, and there indeed she found at least a trace of a copy: the librarian said she had purchased one, but it was out. On further investigation, she discovered it had been out for some four months. Could it be recalled instantly, asked Cate. The librarian seemed unhappy at first, but, succumbing to Cate's air of urgency and high talk of film, she agreed to ring up the borrower, a Miss Parker-Sydenham, who lived, as it happened, in Sintra,just down the hill from the Palace Hotel. Cate herself spoke to Miss Parker-Sydenham, who sounded abashed at having kept the book for so long, and agreed to allow Cate to call round and collect it. ‘I've
nearly
finished it,' she repeated, apologetically, several times.

Cate took the obliging taxi all the way back to Sintra and went to wrest her client's novel from Ms Parker-Sydenham's keeping. The lady proved to be not the tax-evading expatriate Salazar-supporter that her name had evoked, but an impoverished English-language teacher aged thirty who came from Huddersfield. ‘I'm awfully sorry,' she said, yet again. ‘Don't apologize to
me,'
said Cate, and swept off to the hotel with her trophy.