The Witch of Exmoor (35 page)

David D'Anger, they agree, must live in a rum world. He has clearly had far more advantages than any of them and they have turned his brain. He has had too much luck and it will do him no good in the long run. They all agree that some of the guests at the hotel where Marvin and Will work do not seem to have earned their leisure and their wealth by any recognizable concept of merit or desert. Jus :ice as fairness hardly shines out in the Mayfair Hotel. Some of the women–well, it's hard to imagine what they can have done to get themselves where they are. Can they have been very very good in their past lives? Surely that's not what the Buddhists mean–that if you're very very saintly and live on brown rice with a begging bowl dressed in c range you'll be reincarnated as a waddling fat-arse with a loud mouth and fuchsia earrings?

Glory says they are thinking on the wrong plane and that she doesn't envy these poor ladies at all. She wouldn't at all like to be fat like that. They can't help it, says Glory. They don't like being fit any more than you would like it, she tells Will and Marvin.

Marvin diplomatically changes the subject and says he likes the Japanese. The Japanese, unlike some, are always very civil to him. People make fun of them, says Marvin, but they are a very polite people. And they tip well.

 

Benjamin will be a long time mending, and Frieda's testaments will be long in the proving. It had not occurred to Frieda or her lawyers that her grandson might not long outlive her, might choose to thrown himself in his bath during the period of probate. Better lawyers than Goltho & Goltho might have been forgiven for overlooking such a possibility. Had Benjamin died on that November night, what would have happened to Frieda's money? It does not bear thinking about. He will live to inherit. Lily McNab will guide him back to life. There is hope for Benjamin. He has deep problems, deep delusions, but he can be brought to the surface. Benjamin D'Anger manages a sort of ghostly smile for Saul Sinnamary, who arrives from Singapore, true to his word, bearing a bright book of the Birds of South America, of coloured plates of great expense and beauty. Saul sits by Benjie and turns the pages. They come to the picture of the whip-poor-will, the goatsucker, a night bird related to the European nightjar with (Saul reads), ‘large eyes and cryptic plumage'. That's us, man, says Saul to Benjie. Large eyes and cryptic plumage. And listen–Saul reads from the accompanying text, a quotation from an eighteenth-century traveller from Yorkshire, who had defended the poor humble bird from its dark, its criminal reputation. Saul reads, Benjie listens. Saul reads very well: he has had a lot of practice.

‘The prettily mottled plumage of the goatsucker, like that of the owl, wants the lustre which is observed in the feathers of the birds of the day. This makes him a lover of the pale moon's nightly beams ... His cry is so remarkable, that having once heard it, you will never forget it. When night reigns over the immeasurable wilds, you will hear this poor bird lamenting like one in deep distress. A stranger would say it was the departing voice of a midnight murdered victim, or the last wailing of Niobe for her children ... Suppose yourself in hopeless sorrow, begin with a loud high note, and pronounce “ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha”, each note lower and lower, till the last is scarcely heard, pausing for a moment or two betwixt every note, and you will have some idea of the moaning of the largest goatsucker in Demerara. Four other species articulate their words distinctly, crying “Who are you, who who who are you” or “Work away, work work work away” or “Willy come-go, Willy Willy Willy come-up” or “Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will”.' Saul reproduces these cries with haunting, heart-breaking melancholy, and concludes, in Charles Waterton's words, ‘You will never persuade the negro to destroy these birds, or get the Indians to let his arrows fly at them. They are birds of omen and reverential dread. They are the receptacles for departed souls. They haunt the cruel and the hard-hearted master. Listen again! Listen! “Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha...” '

Saul's fine rendering of the cry of the nightjar-goatsucker is so moving that he begins to cry, for he is an emotional chap, easily distressed; Benjamin too begins to sob, and they sit and hug and weep. Saul wonders if he has gone too far, but he believes in tears, he believes in emotion, he thinks the Guyanese half of Benjie has been repressed, it will do him good to weep and wail. As he sits there, hugging Benjie D'Anger, he decides he could write some bird-poems, try some bird-poem-readings. If they affect a larger audience as they have affected this boy, he will be on to a good thing.

When Benjie has sniffed and blown his nose, he looks a lot more cheerful, and more alert. He wants to know who wrote the bit about the bird, and Saul looks up the name and dates of Yorkshire squire Charles Waterton, and promises to investigate further. He wants to know if Saul really knows about birds, and Saul is cornered into modesty. For all the hundreds of species he had ticked off on his checklist, he admits he can only recognize, unaided, a dozen or so. ‘Poets are cheats, Benjie,' he says. ‘You remember that. They get drunk on words. They like words and sounds. Some of them use their eyes, but a lot of them only use their ears. Have you heard of Sylvia Plath?'

Benjie nods. (Odd, thinks Saul, how all conversation with Benjie seems to plunge of its own accord towards suicide and death, but he ploughs on.)

‘Sylvia Plath,' says Saul Sinnamary, ‘was a great poet. But she couldn't tell a rook from a jackdaw.'

‘How do you know?' asks Benjie.

‘Because she said so.'

Saul has struck a lucky subject. He confesses that he himself, like Plath, is bad at British birds, all of which look much the same to him, and Benjie is able to recite Frieda's little rhyme. Saul is delighted with it. He repeats it, writes it down. He can do something with it, he thinks.

 

The solitary egret walks through the salt marsh.

 

Benjamin studies the plates of the book which Saul Sinnamary has entrusted to him, and discovers from a footnote that Charles Waterton had most improbably been married to the granddaughter of an Arawak princess from Guyana. David D'Anger, also true to his word, remembers to track down the reference by Andrew Salkey to Wilson Harris's lecture in Georgetown in 1970, and he finds it: Salkey, studying the audience at this event, noted of Guyana's once and future Premier and long-time Leader of the Opposition: ‘Dr Cheddi Jagan interested me most. For a man who has had to deal, variously, with the wily, rhetoric-laden representatives of British Imperialism and with the cryptic vocabulary of the infiltrating priests of the State Department and the CIA, and also with the Minotaur of Guyanese Party politics with their gelignite of opposing races, a man, in other words, who should know his metaphysics from his materialism, if only because he has had to distinguish between the contrasting mysticisms of Hinduism and Mohammedanism, between the language of Marx and the message of the American millennium, and between the call of Fidel and the killing signals of Macmillan and Sandys, poor Cheddi seemed more bewildered, dislocated and beaten, during Wilson's lecture and afterwards than at any time in his long political Gethsemane!'

Saul had been right. There was a sentence. There was Guyana. Poetry and politics. But what had Guyana in the 1970s or the 1990s to do with the expatriate D'Angers? Cheddi Jagan has returned to Freedom House, but Ashcombe, not Eagle Valley, is the D'Anger problem now.

And what of radon-reeking Ashcombe, what of the secrets of the Haxbys?

Gogo has no interest in them. Her world has narrowed to the small round of Benjamin's convalescence. She wakes to worry, she falls asleep to worry. For David too the world has narrowed. The condition-of-England, the condition-of-Guyana, and the conditions of post-colonial cultures worry him yet, but they worry him less than the condition of poor Benjamin. David's dream of himself as a small stick figure vainly dragging at a vast and heavy carpet has given way to a new vision: he sees the scales of blind and bloody justice held aloft, and in one round burnished dish stand all the heavy peoples, in the other a thin boy. They balance, and the brass bowls tremble. Would he sacrifice the peoples of the world for that child, the Inquisitor asks, the Devil tempts. It is no question, but the vision will not go away. Let us save the one before we try to save the many, a spirit whispers. It is no question, answers David D'Anger to the spirit. But his answer rings thin. What has he been missing, what have his statistics left out?

Cate Crowe has no such preoccupations. To her the whole Ashcombe débâcle has been an accursed nuisance. An entertaining nuisance, at times, but nevertheless a nuisance. She wants a signature on a contract, she wants a percentage. There is a possibility of serious money here. The film rights of
Queen Christina
wander in some kind of limbo, and other contracts and tax forms need urgent attention too. Can it be right that a sick sub-teenage boy is to answer for all these decisions? Nobody seems to know who is responsible for what. And those memoirs that Frieda Haxby was said to be writing–where are they? The obituaries had hinted at interesting liaisons, at unlikely friendships. Had Frieda written anything saleable before she plunged to her watery grave? Is there a typescript at Ashcombe, or in a safedeposit in Exeter?

Cate Crowe nags, phones, faxes. The Palmer family prevaricate. Yet the Palmer family know that somebody should go to Ashcombe soon, to sort out the papers, to rescue objects of value. An agent has been put in charge of sealing doors and windows against the winter, but one cannot trust a man from Taunton with a literary estate.

Which of them shall we send? Whose turn is it now?

As Rosemary observed in our opening pages, it's one hell of a long way, and since she said that, the weather has been getting worse, the nights longer, and the distance no shorter, although there is a new bypass round one of the villages on the A39. Rosemary refuses to go: she's done her turn. Daniel is still too busy with his river case. Gogo can't leave Benjie. Patsy doesn't see why she should, and, although one of nature's meddlers, she dares not meddle in this. It is agreed that Nathan, even if he were willing, could not cope with the Englishness of Exmoor. And David D'Anger, who has most reason to go, knows that he cannot. Innocent or guilty, he is no longer trusted by the Palmer clan, and a visit to Ashcombe, even if he could spare the time, would confirm his collusion with Frieda, would exclude him for ever from grace. (If he is not already so excluded. Daniel has not spoken to him since the reading of the wills.)

Whom does that leave?

The finger begins to point at Emily. She can easily be reclaimed once more from Florence. She has passed her driving test and is young enough to enjoy driving. She has already demonstrated herself to be an unusually mature and independent young woman. She can be bribed and controlled. She has a lot more sense than Simon, and anyway Simon can't drive. She can take a friend for company if she wants–she can take her brother Simon for company if she wants–but it is Emily that shall be dispatched. She has always taken a balanced and friendly view of Grandma Frieda. She can go and sort it all out.

Emily accepts the suggestion without protest. Once again she is flattered by the faith which others have in her, though she wonders in passing if she has been cast too readily for life as a responsible adult. She says she'd be happy to go alone. She does not say that she would hate to go with Simon, cannot think of a worse companion than Simon.

Everyone is delighted with her. She is flown home Business Class, and sips champagne and nibbles canapés over the Alps. She is becoming a seasoned traveller.

Daniel and Patsy press upon her money, keys, advice, a mobile telephone. She must spend the night in comfort in the best hotel the coast can offer, and ring them–they give her multiple, variant numbers, for they will do anything but go there themselves–if she has any queries. She must bring away any portable valuables, and Frieda's computer. On the way back, she should report to the estate agent at Taunton, who has offered to provide some kind of surveillance of the property. She must not walk along the coast path. And, says Daniel repeatedly, with unusual paternal solicitude, she must
not
stay in the house too long, getting cold and damp and breathing in the mildew. She must wrap up warm.

Emily is pleased and amused by all this attention. She is impressed that she is being offered Daniel's BMW instead of Patsy's muddy Datsun.

On the night of her departure she rings Benjie, because she knows that Benjie knows some of Frieda's secrets. Benjie, she thinks, sounds dreadful, his voice mean, flat and pinched, but he manages to say that there is some stuff in the butler's pantry, some wooden animals in a shoe box and some old fossils. They are for him. He wants them. She'd better bring them now or they'll get chucked out, he says.

He does not say that everything is for him, although she knows he knows it.

She is surprised by his request. Has he reverted to some kind of playground infancy, that he keeps requesting from her children's games? Is this part of his breakdown? And she is surprised when, as they say goodbye, he mutters, ‘I say, Em, have you ever been down Wookey Hole?'

She denies all knowledge of Wookey Hole and the Cheddar Caves, but in the morning checks her map and sees that they are on her route. On the way back, perhaps?

Emily sets off early, the keys to Ashcombe dangling importantly from the car key-ring, and drives westwards. It is a glorious day, one of those brilliant winter days when the sun shines from an azure lightly streaked with small white high faraway tendrils of cirrus cloud. It is cold at first, but she fancies it grows milder and warmer, or is that the car's excellent heating system, which purrs so comfortably around her feet and knees? She feels a powerful disembodiment at the wheel of her father's car, as she crosses the counties. Hitch-hikers solicit her, bearing placards requesting the M5, Plymouth, Exeter, but she ignores them, cherishing her solitude, listening to the radio, flicking channels imperiously from Mozart to Manilow, from Kiss to Classic, from disc jockey and Car Marts to discussions of the clitoral orgasm. The world is hers, and this is England. She eats sandwiches from a plastic box guiltily packed by Patsy, and drops crumbs upon her navy sweatshirt. She is young, she is weightless. She has no cares. She has an admirer, in the ancient city of Florence, who says he adores her, but she is free of heart. She sometimes allows him intimate caresses, but not very often. He is not the one. Technically, she is a virgin, although she is well acquainted with the clitoral orgasm, which she had discovered many years ago with the active participation of Sally Partington. She has liked Florence, and her course in Art History, and her language classes, and her new friends, and the striped buildings. But she lives in an interlude. All things are yet possible to her. She drives on, at eighty miles an hour, to meet them, through the levels, past the headlands, past the glittering high horizon of the sea.