The Witch of Exmoor (4 page)

The Palmers spring from Frieda Haxby Palmer, the self-elected witch of Exmoor, the daughter of the Fens. A genetic freak of talent, intelligence or mother-wit had elevated her, and her children had slipped quietly up the ladder after her. Now she has gone mad, spun off into space, but they smile still from their perches like smug saints mounting a cathedral coping. As though they had always expected to be there, as though nothing short of revolution could dislodge them. And, as David D'Anger's game had illustrated, that revolution will never come, or not in this millennium. What we have, we hold.

Nathan knows he will have to go in and face yet another late-night discussion about Frieda. Loitering in the poisoned garden will not let him off. Nor does he wish to be spared. He is fond of Frieda, in his way, and like all the rest of them he finds her of obsessive interest. He will return to the kitchen, in the hope that the washing-up is over and the coffee and the brandy on the tray. He takes a final inhalation, as he makes his way back towards the house–he breathes the stink of the bitter cress, the Mermaid rose.

 

In the kitchen, we find Patsy, covering cheese with cling-film. The kettle boils on the Aga, and there will be a choice of real coffee, unreal coffee, tea, herb tea. This, as Nathan likes to reflect, is the age of choice. Patsy is tired, and she has a busy day on Sunday–she has decided, masochistically she supposes, that she must attend the Quaker meeting, and then she has to rush back and provide lunch, not only for her house guests but also for a neighbour or two. Why does she do it? God knows. She is tired, and Daniel too looks tired. She thinks he may drop dead of a heart attack. He works too hard. They both work too hard.

The washing machine already purrs quietly, but David D'Anger is drying the crystal glasses, which must be done by hand, and wondering where Nathan has got to. Nathan always disappears when there is any housework to be done. Nathan is an old-fashioned bastard, thinks David, whereas David considers himself to be the New Man. There David stands, tea-towel in hand, the New Millennial Black British Man. He has, of course, another label–indeed, he has several others. He is an academic. He is a politician. He is a journalist. He appears on television. He is a parliamentary candidate for a marginal constituency in West Yorkshire, which he fully expects to win. He is the future. But he has astutely allied himself to the clan of the Palmers, which gives him added credibility. He is the coming man, and they will back him.

You will never guess what Gogo does, when she is not being sister, wife, daughter, mother. I had better tell you. There she is, offering the carving dish for the dog to lick clean before she hands it to David at the sink. The dog licks and wags her tail gratefully. Gogo almost smiles at the dog and says, ‘Good girl', in a superior but approving tone. She uses this tone to man, woman, child and beast. Gogo is a consultant neurologist at a hospital in Bloomsbury. That disapproving look comes from examining the slices of other people's brains. She frightens her patients and her colleagues. She is an excellent wife for an aspiring politician. Had David D'Anger constructed her from a range of spare sample parts, he could never have come up with anything as convincing as this. She surpasses imagination. Nobody could have invented Gogo. Not even Nathan could have designed a Wife Image as plausible, as venerable, as alarming as Gogo. And she is only forty-two.

Compared with Gogo, young Rosemary, who is forty, is a lightweight, though of course nobody dares to say so, for she takes herself very seriously, and after all she is a Palmer and English and a good deal more respectable in appearance and behaviour than her husband. You were warm when you thought she might be something to do with the media–she is the right generation to choose such a career, and unlike the others she looks as though she may have some sense of what is going on in the ephemeral world of fashion. She probably knows the names of designer clothes, and could tell you which restaurants are in vogue. She knows the language of the day. So you will not be surprised to hear that she is the Programme Co-ordinator for one of the largest arts complexes in the country. She is in charge of a large budget. Theatre, music, art and dance all bow and beg to her.

So there you have them. The dishwasher churns on into a noisier mode, and Patsy puts the kettle upon the tray. Yes, there you have them–Daniel and Patsy Palmer, David and Gogo D'Anger, Nathan and Rosemary Hera–for Nathan has sneaked back in again, his fag ends in his pocket. (He extricates them and drops them, discreetly, into the wastebin–the wrong wastebin, for it is the one Patsy reserves for compost, but how is he to know?) The middle classes of England. Is there any hope whatsoever, or any fear, that anything will change? Would any of them wish for change? Given a choice between anything more serious than decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea, would they dare to choose? As Nathan had considered as he walked the lawn, they are all of them already, irrevocably, halfway up to their necks in the mud of the past of their own lives. Not even a mechanical digger could get them out alive now. There are no choices. The original position has been for ever lost.

We have forgotten about Simon and Emily. Where have they gone? They have taken themselves off to the small sitting-room where they are watching a horrible video, one of Patsy's specials. They find it entertaining, but not quite entertaining enough. They yawn. They had talked of having a play with Emily's new computer game, Simcity, but although Emily is game to redesign her last fantasy conurbation, Simon seems to have lost interest. He never wants to concentrate on anything for long. He lacks perseverance.

Simon is at Oxford, at one of the wealthier colleges, reading History, or so his family believe. Emily is still at school, in the sixth form, sitting her A-Levels, and after them, whatever her results, she will take a year off, and her first solitary trip abroad. Simon and Emily are only ankle-deep in their lives as yet. Perhaps not even that. But the mud pulls and sucks.

The dog is called Jemima. She is an elderly, overweight Dalmatian. I don't suppose you need to know that. I don't suppose the Palmers need a dog. But they've got one.

A family weekend in Hampshire. Tennis has been played. They all play, except for Nathan. And, despite all, at this late day, they still play to win.

 

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood
...

 

A faint blue line lies on the horizon. Frieda Haxby Palmer stares as it fades. The days are long. The light glimmers on the water. The moon is on the wane. And so is she. She has had her supper of tuna and brine. She lights another cigarette, coughs, refills her glass, and stares westwards. Is that a boat, far across the channel? She reaches for her binoculars. This is the smugglers' coast.

Meals less delicious than chicken with rosemary, meals even less delicious than tuna in brine with stale Ryvita, have been consumed on this summer evening in Britain. Up and down the country pre-packed foods, take-away foods, junk foods, fattening foods, slimming foods, ill-cooked foods have been devoured, messed with, rejected, spewed on to pavements and trampled into gutters. Does anybody actually
starve
? Is it necessary for anyone to dig around in wastebins amongst the fag ends? And if not, WHY DO THEY DO IT? Nobody really knows. Opinions range, but nobody really knows. Relative poverty, absolute poverty–these are shifting concepts, as are the conditions hidden behind phrases like ‘free range' and ‘farm fresh' and ‘corn fed' and ‘free roaming' and ‘fresh barn'. Does anybody really know anything? If we pulled away the veil, what
would
we see?

In her prime Frieda Haxby Palmer had been good–uncomfortably good, but nevertheless good–at the lifting of the veil. She had been a professional asker of unpleasant questions. She had been admired and indeed honoured for this. But now she has gone mad. This is the opinion of her three children.

In middle age, many women go mad. They are expected to. Frieda had survived her fifties triumphantly, only to crack up in her sixties. Is it a delayed menopause, Rosemary has wondered? Had Frieda been an early convert to Hormone Replacement Therapy, and is she now suffering from withdrawal symptoms?

Over their decaffeinated coffee and herb tea, the Palmers, the Herzes and the D'Angers revert once more, repetitively, obsessively, to the subject of Frieda's madness. They had seen it coming, they now claim, for some time, though none of them disputes that her last invitation to Romley had marked a new stage. That evening had been the end.

But there had been a long trail of premonitions, which they now recall, discuss, recall. We must go back with them into the recent past, before we accept her final invitation and set off with her three children to the Mausoleum in Romley for the last supper.

About two years ago Frieda, who had never smoked, or at least not to their knowledge, took up cigarettes. She was seen puffing away, and seen not only by them. She appeared, cigarette in hand, in public, on platforms, in photographs.

This was not good. It was not fashionable. But when Daniel mildly raised the point, she declared that she had smoked a good deal as a girl, had given it up for years, and had now decided she would take to it again. She enjoyed it. It was no business of theirs, she implied. Who knows, maybe she was also snorting cocaine? They worried now that she would burn herself to death in bed, like Barbara Hepworth. Set that hotel on fire and blaze like a beacon, blaze across the water like Baldur on his death ship.

She took up smoking, and she also took up the opera. In her earlier life she had shown little interest in music, but in her last year in London she was to be seen at the Royal Opera House, at the Coliseum, sometimes alone, sometimes with a motley and expensive entourage. Late in the day, late in the century, she discovered Wagner; she even wrote a letter in defence of Wagner which was published in a newspaper. Her children, who knew that she knew nothing about Wagner, read it with suspicion. She might fool the editor of the Letters Page and a few thousand ignorant readers, but she did not fool them. They hoped she would not take up writing daily letters to the papers, though it was, they conceded, a cheaper pastime than smoking and the opera, and considerably cheaper than gambling, in which she also began to express an interest.

Then there was the business with the car. Stuck in a traffic jam for twenty minutes one day in the West End (in Dover Street, to be precise, on her way to collect a painting from a gallery, for another of her new eccentricities had been the rash purchasing of art works), she had suddenly switched off her engine, got out and left the car there, in the solid, motionless traffic. Oddly, nobody had watched her leave. People do not notice middle-aged or elderly women. It was only when the traffic flow finally eased that her empty silver Saab was spotted there, driverless, abandoned, a ghost car. It created chaos. She had gone on to the gallery, picked up the painting and gone home in a taxi all the way to Romley. When questioned, she said she never wanted to see the car again. Finders keepers, she had offered. But it had come home to her like a pigeon, like a grey gull, and now it roosted whether she wanted it or not, nesting grimly at the sea's edge– or so Rosemary claimed.

But the most alarming manifestation of madness had been her VAT challenge. This had frightened them more than any of her other oddities, for the financial consequences had seemed incalculable. She had taken on the mighty indifference of Her Majesty's Customs and Excise in a court of law. It was an unprecedented action. She had asserted that the VAT inspector's report on her bookkeeping had been ignorant and incompetent, she disputed this forward and pert young woman's assessment of the VAT and VAT status of her Swedish booty, and she refused to charge VAT on certain expenses incurred outside the UK. She insisted that Her Majesty owed her interest, now, not next year, on a year's overpayment. Her accountants had not liked this procedure at all, and had tried to dissuade her: unwise to venture into such grey areas, she was advised. But Frieda, who had taken against the inspector with a vengeance, was determined. She said she was prepared to spend her entire capital and go to gaol for this
cause célèbre.
Let the light shine in the grey areas, she had insisted. Her regular lawyers had refused to act for her, but she had found other lawyers quite willing to take her money: the name of their firm was Goltho & Goltho. The enterprise had proved expensive but not ruinous. She had confronted the experts, and had stood her ground as they shook their heads and wagged their fingers and sneered and talked gobbletalk at her. The original inspector, produced as witness, had been unwisely condescending; neatly suited, smartly lipsticked, with bouncy bobbed hair and an air of implacable self-righteousness, she had tried to make the old lion look a fool. Little smiles, becks, innuendoes. But Frieda had refused to budge. She had got her case up well. and she had argued it well. Little Miss Cockburn Cocksure had been confused and wrongfooted. Miss Cockburn could hardly believe that this was the same shabby old creature she had been to see in Romley. Why had nobody warned her? But, as Frieda argued, Miss Cocksure's ignorance was no excuse. She was not paid to be ignorant.

The case ended in a stand-off. Both sides claimed victory, but the moral victory was Frieda's. A good deal of unpleasant publicity had been generated, and the public was on Frieda's side. She had presented herself as the Little Woman, fighting for justice against the bureaucrat, and indeed for the duration of the hearing had managed to see herself in that light: she had not managed to convince her children of her harmlessness and frailty, and the tribunal had its suspicions too, but even her son Daniel had to concede that she'd had a case and made the best of it. ‘I don't like being pushed around, at my age,' had been her explanation for her conduct. ‘I don't like pert little nobodies coming into my house and drinking my coffee and talking to me as if I'm a halfwit. Do you know what that woman called me? Frieda! She addressed me as Frieda. On a first meeting. Without a by-your-leave. I wasn't going to let her get away with that, was I?' It was almost enough to make you feel sorry for Miss Cocksure, with her round eyes and her prim pink cheeks and her double-breasted navy-and-white striped jacket and her brass buttons and her silly frilly white jabot.