The Witch of Exmoor (37 page)

(Emily, at this point in the narrative, begins to feel severe restlessness. Will Grandma Frieda never get to the point? Emily wants the lurid death scene, not this dreary and brutal self-questioning. It's slightly depressing, to find that your grandmother wishes your father had never been born. And there's no way of knowing, with this machine, when the death will come, if ever. There may be some means of discovering how long MEM9 is, as a document, but Emily isn't sufficiently familiar with the programme. A PC isn't like a book, when you can tell if the end is nigh from the number of pages. There could be millions more megabytes to go, before Great Aunt Hilda snuffs it. Her fate may be trapped in there, somewhere. Or perhaps Frieda drowned before she reached the big scene? Frieda doesn't seem to have gone in for dating her documents. And anyway, we don't have a death date. For Frieda, or for Hilda.

Emily scrolls rapidly forward, through seamless yards of glowing electronic pale-green characters. Rotterdam, bomb damage, reconstruction, Oxford University Press, Dry Bendish, the North Sea, Uppsala, Sweden, Grotius, Descartes, Hilda, Hilda, Andrew, Hilda, pregnancy, National Health Service, Romley, telegram, Hackney, SOS.

Emily slows down, arrests the lives flowing soundlessly away under her middle mouse finger.)

 

‘She'd sealed the doors and the windows, towels under the doors, sticky tape on the windows. That's how people did it in those days, when domestic gas was still lethal. All you had to do was put your head in the oven and make sure there wasn't too much leakage. It was far and away the most popular method. And that's what she'd done, except she'd put two heads in the oven, instead of one. In fact to be brutal, she'd shoved the baby
right in
the oven. It was a little girl, about a year old, with faintish-red hair, wrapped up in a yellowish crochet baby blanket. Its head was on a pile of folded tea-towels. Hilda was wearing her dressing-gown, but she'd knotted a scarf round her eyes. She was kneeling there, like at the guillotine. I didn't see the baby at first. Mrs Munnings just stood there in the doorway, gasping. We could both smell the gas. We were both so slow, it seemed, but I must have been very quick, because I'd opened the windows, and pulled Hilda out, and pulled the baby out, and seen the envelope on the table, and pushed it down in my coat pocket, and all before Mrs Munnings moved. The windows were sticky, they were old sash windows with dirty cords and sort of corrugated frosted glass. The room looked out over the passage to the house next door. I remember the cold air coming in. Mrs Munnings put her apron over her nose and mouth, I think she thought she'd be poisoned in twenty seconds. I must have turned the gas tap off, but I don't remember doing it. Only the oven was on, not the top burners. The oven was filthy, thick with grease.

‘The envelope was addressed to me. She was expecting me, because she'd sent for me. It was so deliberate. What if I'd got there sooner, while she was still alive? It was revenge. She summoned me.

‘She'd been living here for months, it turned out. More or less round the corner. I could have got there sooner if I'd recognized the address sooner; if I'd taken a cab, if I hadn't had to find someone to leave with my own lot. But at the inquest they said she'd have been dead anyway. She'd given herself plenty of time, before summoning me. She knew what she was doing. They were quite kind to me at the inquest. The wronged wife. Nobody seemed to blame me.

‘That was the end between me and Andrew, as she'd meant it to be. He ran
off.
He was always a coward. But sometimes I think it was nothing to do with Andrew at all. He was just piggy in the middle. We cooked him up between us. No wonder he scarpered. She'd sealed herself into the kitchen in the small hours. They say that's the time when most people do it.

‘She summoned me, and I arrived too late, but not too late to see her there. Now I summon her, but she won't come. Where is she? She was Mummy's favourite. Mummy would never accept what had happened. She refused to believe it. And after Hilda's death, Mummy hated me all the more, and needed me all the more. Hilda had escaped but I would never escape.

‘I burnt Hilda's farewell letter. That was the strangest thing I ever did. I took it home, and burnt it. I never told anyone about it. Until this moment. And now I'm only telling myself. I didn't even read it. I didn't want it read out at the inquest. I opened it, in my own kitchen, back in Romley. Was it a letter of reproach? Of hatred? I assumed it was. But maybe it was an apology. I remember thinking, if I burn this, I'll never have to read it. Burning cannot be reversed. Burning is a one-way process. Burning leaves no possibility of a second chance, of regrets. Burning isn't a cry for help. Burning is final.

‘So they said at the inquest she didn't leave a message.

‘She failed to kill me once. When I was a child. And so she killed herself.'

 

Here ended MEM9.

Emily Palmer stared at its last sentences, reran the passage, reread it. Well, she'd found Hilda's death with a vengeance. Poor old Grandma, what a saga. How squalid. What a nasty little story to carry around with you for more than half a lifetime. Poor old Hilda. Poor little baby. Poor everybody. Poor Mrs Munnings, whoever she was.

Emily stretched and yawned. A bird was beginning to sing, out there in the darkness. She'd been here all night. Soon it would pale from the East, though the nights were long in December. They had come from the East, the Haxby axemen.

Emily switched off Frieda's machine. Silently its stories were swallowed into its memory.

She thought she ought to get some kip. Suddenly she felt very tired, and her eyes felt scratchy. A long drive, then all this family history. Emily had a hostility to family. Her own was so smug, so blind, so self-righteous. And look what family did to people. Grandma Frieda seemed to blame everything on her mother, who no doubt blamed her mother, and so on for ever, everyone complaining from generation to generation that life hadn't been fair to them, that they hadn't had a good start, a fair deal, the right parents, the right home ... What a miserable succession.

Emily settled herself down on a broken-down settee, in the big room downstairs, and arranged the blow heater so that it blew warmly right on her. She wrapped herself up in Grandma Frieda's duvet. She hadn't fancied Grandma Frieda's bed at all, nor her bedroom. Both had been unhygienic. Almost worse than the tale of Hilda's death had been the sight of an encrusted china chamber-pot right under Grandma's bed. And in the wardrobe there had been another two chamber pots, luckily empty. How odd of Grandma to have wired herself up to E-Mail and for all Emily knew the Internet, and yet to have disdained the flush lavatory. How could anyone in the late twentieth century choose to use a pot? (Emily Palmer was too young to imagine a weak bladder on a cold night.)

Emily snuggled down. The duvet was clammy, and she felt a bit sneezy. She'd put in a few hours' snooze and then she'd think it all over. She knew she ought to have rung the hotel. She ought to have rung home. Where the hell had she left the phone? Was it still in the car? She dozed, then fell into deep sleep. The heater whirred on, at young Benjamin D'Anger's putative expense. The bird sang in the ash tree.

 

We are nearing the end. Soon we can go for the kill. Indeed, for the overkill. Frieda has killed Hilda, and we have killed Frieda, and Benjamin has tried to kill himself. There will be one or two more deaths, but not many. Some will survive.

Simon Palmer is easily disposed of. He will come to a bad end. He may be found dead on a bathroom floor, or at the bottom of a lift shaft, or knifed in an alley, or mangled by lions. He may be run down on a dark night by a drunken driver. It is only a matter of time.

Jess and Jonathan Herz will survive, and so will Rosemary Herz, though she will lose her job and be placed on medication for the rest of her life. She will probably remarry, it is thought.

Nathan Herz's prospects, you may gather, are not good.

Neither are Will Paine's. Can we really expect Will Paine to get away with it? I would like him to, for he is a friend of mine, and I like him,but frankly the odds are against him. How can his moral luck last? The odds have been stacked against him all his life. He was born in the wrong place at the wrong time and of the wrong parents. You must have noticed that he has a good nature and an intelligence above the average. Given a little more help, he could have improved his lot immeasurably, but he stupidly drew the wrong lot. I fear that it is very likely that he too, like Simon Palmer, will come to a bad end. The net will close in on him. He is a natural suspect.

We shall hear more of the D'Anger family, before the end. Lily McNab struggles to reclaim Benjamin. She explores his illogical conviction that he is responsible for Frieda's death. She discovers that he is the victim of the grossly exaggerated expectations of both his parents. They had pinned too much on this child, they had expected him to be perfect. Never has he been allowed a normal childhood. He has been asked to fly too high, and in response he has dived too deep. He has been convinced he is a hero and a genius and a saint, and now he is being forced to recognize that he is only a boy. His parents have been much to blame. They have loved him too much. They are humbled now.

The Emmanuel delusion becomes a commonplace, as the millennium approaches. Lily McNab will write a book about it.

Let us wait a little. Let us return to Emily Palmer, the wise virgin, as she wakes on a December morning by the sea.

 

When Emily wakes, it is already mid-morning, and the blow heater has stopped blowing. Either it has fused itself or the electricity has gone off. Emily is still warm in Frieda's stuffy high-smelling duvet, but she wakes to feelings of guilt and sorrow. She ought to have rung home, she is saddened by the fate of her great-aunt,and she is worried about poor little Benjie, oppressed by this great heap. She realizes that, despite her confidence of yesterday, she is nervous about driving back up that dangerous drive. She fears that she will never get back to the top of the hill, never get back up to the coast road. What if the car won't start, what if it stalls?

This is silly, she tells herself, as she unwinds her bedding, tests the lights, makes her way to the bathroom for a splash. The electricity seems fine: it is just the heater that has overworked itself and conked out. She brushes her teeth, sponges herself, digs clean underwear out of her bag. She could have been pampering herself with bacon and egg and sausage and mushroom and fried tomato, instead of hacking open this tin of beans. She stands in the window, looking out towards the sea, tin in hand, forking out the beans into her mouth. The light is bright and clear and warm and very still. In the far distance she can hear a strange howling, as of wild animals. She opens the tall deep windows and leans out over the low ledge to listen. A howling, a yaffling, a baying. The Beast of Exmoor, no doubt.

She smiles at herself, and begins to feel brighter. She would love to meet the Beast. Where, she wonders, is her friend the toad? She must start to pack. She takes herself off to the butler's pantry and begins to box up the silver, the toy animals, the fossils, the jewels. Then she goes back up to the top of the house to the computer tower, and unpins the instructions from the walls, piles Frieda's discs into cartons, assembles the more important-looking papers. She is a little nervous about disconnecting the machine, for it had worked so perfectly the night before, and what if she unplugs something serious? To move the machine she knows it must be put in Park Mode, but how to do that? She switches it on, one last time, and calls up Frieda's memoirs. Will this be the only copy of them, or are they on hard disc? She thinks they will not have reached a disc. Does she want the rest of the family to read them? She could erase them, now, and they might vanish for ever. She might destroy them, as Frieda had destroyed Hilda's last message. What would Frieda have wanted? Would Frieda have wanted Benjamin, her chosen grandson and heir, to read of these miserable long-ago things? Benjamin is depressed enough without his Great Aunt Everhilda on his back. It wouldn't be good for Benjamin to discover a family history of suicide. On the other hand, if Frieda hadn't wanted it known, why had she tried to write it down? Emily switches the machine off, and decides that none of it is her business. She is only a messenger.

She will go down and load the car. She will brace herself to ring home and face the music.

As she carefully descends the rotten stairs, she can hear the howling and baying. It is nearer now, and there are other curious, unexpected noises–can that be the blowing of horns, and the hoofs of horses, and the grinding of gears? Suddenly the whole landscape is alive around her, as turbulence gathers about her, rushes towards her, thunders and crashes towards her and the house. She runs into the big front ground-floor room where she had slept, where the large window still stands open, and she sees in amazement that the whole of the hillside is pouring towards her in violent turmoil. Trees toss and bend, stones and rocks bounce and roll and splinter at her, a whole avalanche descends towards her, and just as she begins to make sense of this mighty upheaval, a red deer leaps the urned parapet, and crashes across the lawn, and clears the window-sill, and bounds into the arms of Emily Palmer.

The hounds stream after her, and Emily dashes to bar the window, as the deer takes refuge behind the table, putting her hoof through the back of Leland's canvas, knocking the skeleton clock and the red Bristol glass vase to the floor. The hounds throw themselves at the window, in full cry, howling and yelping and lathering, dozens of them, or so it seems to the hind and to Emily. Emily spreads her arms against the window, and screams. ‘Stand back, stand back!' she cries into the garden. The hounds leap, then falter, and across the lawn, hoofs cutting the grass, come the horses and the riders, steaming, angry, hot-blooded, maddened by the chase. The riders in the vanguard reign in their mounts when they see the hounds, when they see Emily at the window, but more and more horses crash down the hillside beside them through the bracken, through the rhododendrons, almost tumbling over one another in the pursuit. Soon the lawn is thick with steaming, snorting steeds and horsemen and dogs, gathered as suddenly, and as improbably, as if they had dropped from the heavens. They yelp and throng.