The Witch of Exmoor (3 page)

And here comes Ben, the divine, the lanky, the dark boy. Ben D'Anger glows with darkness. He wears a yellow night-shirt, and he carries in his arms the large box called Decapolis which holds the Game. Jessica (who is indifferent pale and freckled) wets her lips and tugs at the elasticated waist of her pyjamas. Jon sucks a dark ringlet as he sits, cross-legged, bespectacled, alert, the braces on his teeth glinting in the dimmed light. Ben stands there for a moment, with his arms around Decapolis. It looks innocent: a large cardboard box which once held several dozen tins of dog food, for the dull Dalmatian of the house. He lowers it, ceremoniously. The Herz children silently ask him if, in their month's absence, it has been tampered with. They need no words. He shakes his head. He needs no words. It is intact. Emily has appointed herself its guardian. Emily keeps it safe in her bedroom. It lies in the bottom of her wardrobe, and Patsy is too busy or too lazy to disturb it. Emily is proud to be in collusion, though she has never seen the Game.

Now they begin to unpack its treasures, and lay them out within the video city. Their co-operation is unspoken, intense, complete. First they range the old wooden soldiers salvaged by Daniel from Grandma Frieda's house in Romley. They are handmade period pieces from a bygone age, dating from an unknown childhood. Scraps of faded colour cling to them. Then they line the walls of the video city with the little white plaster busts of the unpainted Rajputani riflemen, lovingly made by a great-great-uncle on the Palmer side who had served long years with the riflemen in India. Then they lay down the pieces of blue ribbon that represent the three great rivers, the Oronoque, the Essequibo and the Demerara, and plant by them the realistic little educational plastic trees of oak and cedar and palm and fig and ebony, and arrange the farmyard animals and the cattle. The scale is bizarre, but that is one of the peculiar thrills of creation. They erect the house called Eldorado, the house called Cayenne, and they lay out the Island of the Dead. Decapolis is a four-cornered city: three of the houses are fortified and occupied, and the fourth is called the Siege House of Hope and Despair. Ben will allot them each a fortress within this small kingdom, and then the game can begin.

It takes nearly half an hour to arrange the site to Ben's satisfaction. He places a lion on a wall, a wolf in a garden, and floats innocent ducks upon the mirror-lake. The materials are heterogeneous–wood, metal, plastic, fabric. There are no prehistoric monsters, for Ben has banned them–they are, he says to Jon and Jessica, banal. ‘Banal' is currently his favourite word. Nor will he admit space monsters. ‘Everything must be
of the earth,'
he insists seriously. Otherwise it will not work.

Because it is real. Ben can make them believe it is real. Ben animates everything. His power to breathe life into objects is supernatural, and they know it. He says he can stare at a postcard and make its leaves shake, its rivers flow, its ships sail across the sea, its figures walk the streets. They believe him. He cannot do it when anyone is watching, for that destroys his powers, but he can do it. At night, alone, he tells them, he can bring to life the paintings on the wall. How does he do it? He stares and stares until his eyes lose focus, he says, as one stares at a three-dimensional computer picture, and then the picture begins to move. Can he get inside the picture, they ask? No, he can never get inside. He is always outside, staring. His are the eyes that make it move. He can never enter into his own vision. He is for ever without. But he has the power. He has the Magic Eye.

They are nearly ready now. It is all laid out, and waiting. It is waiting for the Breath of Life. There is a fear in their anticipation, for last time there had been many wounded, many tortured, many raped, many dead. Drowned, washed downriver, stuck through with bayonets, hurled from high buildings. How will it go this time?

This time, Ben tells Jessica she must possess as her captain the little Indian clay elephant man called Trincomalee. Her fortress will be Eldorado. Jon must possess the figure of St Joseph, taken from some long dismantled Christmas cake: his fortress will be Cayenne. Ben has allotted himself that icy and treacherous terrain, the Isle aux Morts, and his captain will be Beltenebros, on his hone, Bayard. The Metal Queen will occupy the Siege House. She must defend herself without human aid. If she falls, there will be forfeits. There will perhaps be executions. Does one desire to die, or not to die? It is confusing, disturbing. Death is pleasure. Death is pleasant.

Ben distributes the troops. So many soldiers to each army, so many horses, so many black painted cotton reels of ammunition, and one ambulance apiece.

Ben instructs his cousins to stare hard at the small figures. He begins the incantation. They must mesmerize themselves. Jessica stares at the small painted features of Trincomalee, at the black and white and red and brown of his clay. He bares his origins bravely. His blue turban is striped with a pure band of yellow. Jon fixes his attention on the gaudier St Joseph with his tawdry cloak and his cheap Taiwanese colours. Ben fixes himself upon the medieval knight, Beltenebios. ‘Decapolis, decapolis, decapolis,' he murmurs. ‘Isle aux Morts, Isle du Diable, Isle a la Crosse, Isle des Saintes.' Their eyes blur. The small figures begin to march across the carpet. Battle is engaged. This is not a pleasant game. The birds of death gather for the corpses. For many games past, the saviour has not come. Maybe he will never come.

 

Outside in the garden, Nathan puffs at a last cigarette. He has sneaked out. He is still pondering, in a desultory manner, the conundrum of the Veil of Ignorance. From his own original position, as a clever Jewish lad in suburban lower-middle-class East Finchley, he would have found it hard to imagine the details of the world he temporarily inhabits–this lawn, these scented trees, these in-laws, these assumptions. Had the Veil of Ignorance been snatched from his sixteen-year-old eyes, he would have been surprised by this flash forward. He had been ambitious enough–more ambitious then than he is now–but he would not have recognized the significance of the decor of his life to be. Indeed, as he knows, he does not wholly know it now. He treads his cigarette end into the lawn furtively, then furtively bends and picks it up again and puts it in his pocket. Patsy and Daniel are proud of their garden and spend time on it. They talk about it. They even talk about it to Nathan, although they must know that he is a lost cause. The flower culture of the English middle classes pisses him off. The names of old roses make him ill. He knows more brand names of cigarettes and detergents than he knows names of flowers. Yet he likes to be here, for an evening.

He takes another turn along the kitchen-garden wall. It has been the first really hot day of the year, but a slight dew is forming underfoot, and a large liquorice-black ribbed slug crosses his path. He peers at it through the thick lenses of his glasses. There is a slightly unpleasant smell on the air, which his cigarette has not overwhelmed. He sniffs. It is coming from those pink roses, those small clustery yellow-stamened pink roses, which no doubt have some very special pretty tide. He approaches them, sniffs more closely. A rotting, fecal, fungal smell. The smell of old rose, of old England, of old women. They are probably called the Duchess of Death, or Cuisse de Vieille, or Marquise de la Mort. Do all roses smell so disgusting? Experimentally, he progresses to a standard rose of deeper crimson, with larger flowers. These smell quite strongly of cheap soap. Never would Nathan inflict a scent so crude upon the British customer.

You have not guessed quite right about Nathan. He is not an academic, though that, with those pebble glasses, that meditative look, those untidy stained baggy weekend trousers, is what he ought to be. He ought to be a professor of immunology or anthropology, but in fact he is in advertising, and on a weekday, in his business suiting, he is more convincing in the role. At weekends he overflows into a ki nd of uncontrolled, deliberate grossness. He is crudely and aggressively Jewish: his large fleshy nose and his broad fingers, his large dark eyes speak of a rich and oriental world he has never visited, a world a thousand miles from East Finchley. Hairs sprout, at the weekends, unrestrained from his chest. They sprout all year round, day and night, from his ears and nostrils and the backs of his hands. Women long to stroke his chest, though as far as he knows they do not long to tweak at his nostrils. He is an attractive man, and he knows it.

He wanders beyond the edge of the kitchen garden into the shrubbery. Here the smell is even worse. It is the sour and woody stink of elderflower, though he cannot identify its source.

Nathan has harnessed his alpha brain to selling products and, occasionally, concepts, for he is respected and astute, and on the way up in a flourishing company. As he inhales the verdant rot, and wipes a glob of white cuckoo spittle from his naked ankle, he contemplates the myth of rural England which has been so successfully marketed to the affluent English. And it is not entirely a myth, for it is here, and now, this little wood, these insects, that calling bird. There is some kind of a fit, however clumsy, between the image and the reality. Daniel's farmhouse, more comfortable now than ever in its working days, is hundreds of years old, and this little wood is older than the house. Ancient coppiced woodland. Vegetables have been grown here for centuries, and for centuries roses have scented and corrupted the air. And who is to say that Daniel and Patsy do not work as hard as any farmer? They work.

Marmalades and mustards and jellies with silly little frills and ribbons round their throats, Victorian pillowcases with honeysuckle patterns, ‘Home Baked' biscuits from the factory, pomanders, posies, lavender bags, pots-pourris
(pourri
indeed, nods Nathan to himself)–one cannot accuse Daniel and Patsy of falling into many of these consumer traps. They have better taste. They bake their bread and eat it. Why, then, this deep unease? Is it envy? Is it some deeper disapproval?

The rural England of the advertising commercial is superimposed on the palimpsest of the England of Hampshire in the 1990s, and that again is superimposed upon the reality of the past, the unknowable reality of history. The layers of image fade, fuse, fix, peel, wrinkle, part.

Nathan lights another cigarette. The selling and packaging of England. He has taken part in it. He had intended to be an anthropologist, but reading Mary Douglas on the meaning of shopping had revealed to him the light. He had been twenty-one at the time and about to sit his Finals. Suddenly he had seen it all, revealed in the broad rays of the future. Shopping was indeed our new religion. Consumer choice, in a post-industrial society, was our area of free will, informed perhaps by grace. He would participate in the new faith, as priest, as confessor. He would set up his stall in the Temple.

God, how right he had been, how horribly, uncannily right. Nathan the prophet. Even he would not have predicted the degree to which shopping as a full-time pursuit would have caught on in the last fifteen years. The supermarket and shopping centre as fun-fair, family outing, parkland, playground, stately home, temple, youth club, old people's refuge: the shopping arcade as the forum of assignation, rape, abduction, murder, riot. Oh fountains, oh palaces, oh dreams and aspirations! Let us enter those revolving doors, wide enough to take a trolley loaded with £200 of edible merchandise! It is at once glorious and appalling. Is it, he wonders, in his blood? He does not know much about his own blood. His ancestry cannot be traced. His mother would have preferred him to be a doctor or a lawyer. She is timid and conventional and has been much put upon by false images of an alien tribe.

(But perhaps not quite put upon
enough.
Nathan had turned to her one evening–turned
on
her, that's how she put it–and asked her why on earth she had called him Nathan. I mean, what kind of a name is Nathan, for Godsake, he had demanded. I'll tell you what kind of name it is, Ma. It's a
Jewish
name.)

Miriam Herz would have liked her son Nathan to be more like Daniel Palmer. Daniel is a successful barrister, as you might have guessed. He could have been a civil servant, for his manner is mandarin, but he chose the law.

If choice is what he had, if choosing is what we do. Amazing, really, thinks Nathan on the midnight lawn, how we cling to the concept of choice. It is quite clear to Nathan that Daniel is temperamentally disqualified from playing the Veil of Ignorance, because he is quite incapable of imagining a world in which he would not possess a superior and commanding intellect. Daniel knows that in any society he will rise towards the top, so why bother to play with the construction of a society in which there is no top? It is different for David D'Anger, for David, like Nathan himself, is an outsider. An ambitious outsider, living by his wits. His handicap, his blind spot, thinks Nathan, is that he cannot conceive of a society which does not have ambition as its driving force.

Whereas I, thinks Nathan, staring at the nameless stars, I have given up all hope. Good brains I had and a good education, and what did I do with them? I tried to make a bit of money. I married Rosemary Palmer. I bad two children. I had affairs with other women. Not much to show for a life. And I'm the only one of us, it seems, who would jack it all in. To float free of all this, to begin again. So heavy we become, and so entrenched. Our feet are stuck in the clay. We are up to the knees, no, up to the waist, in the mud of the past. We have lived more than half our lives. There is no future. There are no choices left. It has all silted up around us. We are stuck in our own graves.

And that mad old woman up on Exmoor, she is preparing for her own funeral. By all accounts she has left one mausoleum for another, and even now is stitching her own shroud. She is determined to make trouble to the end. One cannot but admire.

Nathan is fascinated by the Palmer family and its history. He is fascinated by Frieda Haxby Palmer.

David D'Anger is right, considers Nathan, to tease the Palmers about their complacency, about their confidence that they will always end up on the right side of any shift or redistribution of power. Yet that complacency comes from a source more mysterious than might at first appear. Seen from afar, the Palmers–Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary–might seem to carry the assumptions of the British middle classes, carried on from generation to generation. But they come from nowhere. They have turned themselves into members of the English middle class by sleight of hand. Their manner, their voice, their pretensions–they appear to date back for centuries, but, as Nathan knows quite well, they date back no further than Frieda Haxby Palmer and her missing husband, whoever he may have been. Nouveaux, that is what they are. But totally convincing. It is a mystery to Nathan. How have they managed it? David D'Anger's family is distinguished, and Patsy's is rich: David is of the expatriate intellectual Indian revolutionary aristocracy of Guyana, and Patsy is of comfortable Quaker stock. The Palmers are nobody, they have come from nowhere, but they look as though they have seized the reins of power. They look as though they have been born to this house, this garden, this tennis court. The D'Angers and the Herzes can never be British. They have the wrong genes, the wrong skin, the wrong noses.