Part 3 (1/2)

David shrugs. 'Yes, I do. I've settled in here.' He smiles, a half appeal. 'And Gogo wouldn't like Georgetown. It's too b.l.o.o.d.y hot in Georgetown. She wouldn't last a week. She can't even take the Mediterranean.'

'And Benjamin is British,' says Daniel the tempter.

'Benjamin can choose for himself one day. I'll take him to see the place when he's older. I'll take him up-country, to the land of jungle and waterfall. To the land of ma.s.s suicide. I've never been up-country myself. And if he likes it, he can have it. I hope we're keeping the possibility open. Gogo and I.'

'Of course,' says Daniel the judicious, 'it's not as though Britain is the seat of empire that it once was. Most of the brain drain goes the other way now, to our ex-colonies. You must have been tempted yourself. As you yourself pointed out, they have more funding.'

'For people in my category, yes, they have more funding. But I don't want to be American. I don't want Benjie to become American. Would you want Simon and Emily to become American?'

'I haven't travelled as much as you,' says Daniel. 'And I've been lucky enough here. Nothing to complain of here.'

'The Americans', says David, 'believe in universal human nature. There's a heroism in that. But they believe that universal human nature is or shall be American. Except when they live in universities, when it suits their interest to think otherwise. Or to say they think otherwise. One can't always tell the difference.'

Daniel stops in his tracks for a moment, to stare at an intrusive rosette of plantain in the smooth temperate English green. Then he remarks, with seeming irrelevance, 'It's b.l.o.o.d.y hot in Singapore. And in Hong Kong.'

'Maybe it's Guyana's turn next,' says David. 'It must come one day. You know how Ralegh described Guyana? ”A country that hath yet her maidenhead.” Guyana for the next millennium. Meanwhile, I'll stay here and support the West Indies.'

Daniel, who does not follow the cricket, concedes a victory. Over the garden and the ridge the sun reaches its zenith. Patsy will be back from Meeting soon, her conscience, they suppose, appeased. A smell of slow-cooking beans and garlic and bacon wafts from the open kitchen window towards them. Beneath the pear tree a full-bosomed matron thrush pecks, jerkily, mechanically, at a worm cast, listening from time to time to sounds below the earth. David and Daniel descend three steps to the lower lawn, the sundial and the fishpond. A white lily opens its petals over the water and yellow irises stand in the marge. This is a temperate, a blessed clime, and with global warming may become yet more blessed, at the expense of less fortunate regions. Daniel has done well to remind his ambitious self and his ambitious brother-in-law that Britain is but a small country, although its population is some sixty or seventy times greater than that of Guyana. Its past has been greater than its future, which may or may not be true of Guyana. But its present holds them all. Daniel would keep it as it is, for he profits from its waning empire. David would change it. But he too profits.

They watch the surface of the pond, where pond skaters skim lighdy and rapidly over the meniscus in search of their drowning prey. 'Yes,' says Daniel, gazing around his own small kingdom with its ancient markers, as the shadow of time's finger moves towards noon. (His recently purchased genuine antique sundial has been set slightly off true by the man from the attic, and time in his garden is a little slower than time on his cheap, Taiwanese, battery-driven watch.) 'Yes,' says Daniel, 'it is very pleasant here, on a nice day like this.'

In Meeting, Patsy makes a perfunctory attempt to free her mind from its terrestrial anxieties, fails, and then settles down to them, methodically, as the silent minutes pa.s.s, as motes turn in the shafts of light that fall through the plain windows of this square familiar building. Two centuries of quiet settle around her, but her brain is full of noise. She worries about her mother in her expensive rest home, about Daniel's mother embattled on Exmoor. She worries about the next meeting of the Video Control and Surveillance Panel and animal abuse films, about the leak over the study window, and about Daniel's heavy workload and his inability to control it. Will Daniel have a heart attack, she wonders? She worries about the Partingtons' lunch in the Agawill it be cooking evenly? She worries about Simon's unhealthy pallor and his occasional outbursts of unprovoked aggression; will he be rude to Judge Partington? She suspects that the Partington daughter, Sally, has had a fling with Simon: had it ended in tears, and if so, who was to blame? But most of all, she worries about the man in the attic. Will he ever leave? She worries about him more than she would ever disclose. Her public line is confidence, but sometimes she admits to herself that she is, very slightly, afraid. Not of him, but of what he represents. She likes him, and he makes himself useful. But she fears his category. And he limits her control. He cannot be contained in her frame. She will have to get rid of him. It is an unpleasant necessity.

Meeting today is quiet, though towards the end of the hour, as Patsy twists and turns her pearl ring round and round her finger, secretly, beneath her handbag, old Arthur Clifford rises to his feet and says a few words about our friends in Eastern Europe, and quotes some lines from a Czech poet. He sits down again and silence resumes, until the two elders, Jane Farr and Ronnie Taylor, turn to one another and shake hands, in the spontaneous ritual of Friends. Gradually the gathering stirs back into life, little conversations break out, greetings are made, news exchanged. Patsy, emerging from the Meeting Room into the wax-scented well-polished outer porch, with its notices of jumble sales and WE A lectures and cultural events, pauses to speak to Sonia Barfoot, one of the more congenial and eccentric of the Meeting's members. Sonia has been in hospital again, and there is a soft, vulnerable, pained, washed look about her once plump, once pretty features. Her colourless hair is parted in the middle and drawn tightly back from her face and constrained by two tortoisesh.e.l.l pins. Her scalp shows pink. An expression of bewildered grief lingers in her pale grey slightly glazed eyes, wide open beneath their bald brows, their long colourless lashes. She is wearing a georgette blouse of lavender blue, a creased linen skirt of darker blue. Spinster's colours. Sonia Barfoot is back from the grave, where once she saw G.o.d.

'Patsy,' she says, making an effort to smile. 'How good to see you.' They clasp hands. She must be on drugs, thinks Patsy, there is something wrong with her eyes. Or has electricity once more crackled through her skull?

'You must come and see me soon,' says Patsy. 'Now you're better.'

'You're always so busy,' says Sonia Barfoot calmly, without reproach. 'And I'm not better. Not really.'

'Ring me,' says Patsy, squeezing the thin, blue-veined, old lady's hand. Sonia is not old, but she seems old. She has suffered too much and it has worn her out. Her suffering is not of the body, but of the mind. 'Ring me. I must dash. I've got to pick up the Partingtons. I want to speak to you about my prisoner. Keep well, Sonia.'

And she breaks away, and turns and waves, and walks briskly off to the car park, to health, to worldliness, to good food, to those un-Quakerly bottles of Bulgarian red. (Cheap wine at lunch, expensive at dinner, that is the Palmer rule, whoever the guests may be.) Judge Partington is nothing if not worldly. Indeed he is gross. He has to sit in the front seat of Patsy's doggy, muddy Datsun, squeezing his wife unceremoniously into the back. And all the way from his mill house by the water meadows to the Palmer homestead he entertains Patsy with tales of the Bar and the Bench. Partington is an opinionated, a controversial judge, and his face is flushed with rich living and low thinking. Today he is wearing his country geara bursting jacket over an open straining checked cotton s.h.i.+rt, and what looks like his gardening trousers. His wife Celia, in contrast, is provocatively well-groomed, and sports a soft navy and white spotted crepe silk dress.

He chatters on, as they bowl over the brow of the ridge, past the wind field, and descend towards the Old Farm. Patsy does not care for local anecdotes and does not listen very hard, though she gathers that there is some story about an injunction that Partington is longing to tell Daniel. Daniel, she thinks, will make a better audienceand indeed, there he is, waiting at the gate, as she b.u.mps over the cattle grid. She slips away, having disgorged her pa.s.sengers, to attend to the lunch.

Gogo and Rosemary have set the garden table on the veranda, and now they all gather, as introductions are made, as sherry and wine are poured. The younger children circle warily, hungrily, wanting crisps and Bombay Mix but not conversation. Simon and Emily know the Partingtons well, for Simon, as Patsy suspects, had once been involved with their daughter Sally, and Emily, in her riding phase, had shared a pony with her; now both Palmer children wish to forget both daughter and pony, but cannot utterly repudiate them, although Simon asks after Sally in a manner that could be construed as either embarra.s.sed or hostile. (Emily does not have to ask after the pony. It went to the knacker's yard some years ago.) There is another lunch guest, an idle rentier from over the hill who has been playing tennis with David and Daniel and Rosemary. Patsy had been rightBill Partington has a story to tell, and he wants them all to hear. He settles heavily into a garden chair, which trembles bravely under his weight, and embarks upon his tale.

'Late last night they delivered it,' he says. 'This video. Old People's Home, going out on Monday in the 6.30 doc.u.mentary slot on South-watch. The home wanted it stopped. More importantly the relatives. Gross invasion of privacy. False allegations. Indecent filming. So I told them to send it round to me. Celia and I saw it last night. Disgusting, wasn't it, Celia?'

'Fairly disgusting,' says his wife judiciously, as she sips her orange juice and casts covert glances at Daniel Palmer's handsome brother-in-law David D'Anger, who is listening to her husband's speech with unfeigned curiosity. Has she seen him somewhere before? Is he in television? Should she warn Bill to watch his big mouth?

'Bottles on potties, that's what it was,' says Partington, and laughs uproariously. 'Bottles on potties. Endless shots of bottles on potties. Wrinkled bottles, hairy bottles. And the contents of potties. You can't avoid s.h.i.+t these days. Medical programmes, wildlife programmes, archaeology, stand-up comicsit's all excrement. You wouldn't have got away with it in the old days. Talk about violence guidelines, it's guidelines on s.h.i.+t that we need these days. What, Patsy? Patsy agrees, don't you, Patsy?'

(But Patsy is indoors, carving the joints of the bacon, arranging the slices of pink meat and white fat on the meat dish, licking her fingers, picking out a clove, miles and miles away.) 'So what did you do?' asks Daniel politely. He enjoys Partington's performances and is glad that his career prospects do not oblige him to take them seriously.

'Oh, I slammed on the injunction,' says the merry judge, helping himself to a fistful of cashew nuts. 'Said it was in breach. Nothing but breaches, I told them. Can't do that to people. Can't show their b.u.ms without asking them. They're not all senile. And guess what? d.i.c.k Champer rings me up from the BBC. Direct from the BBC, to complain. Says it's outside my prerogative. Says he'll appeal. He was in a right stew. Fizzing and boiling. Spluttering and choking. Midnight, this was.'

'And the injunction holds?'

'Of course it holds,' says Partington, munching away, his teeth spattered with a white spew of chewed wet nut. 'I'll fix them. I was at Magdalen with Champer. I'll teach him about human dignity. d.i.c.k, I said, I challenge you, you show your bare b.u.m on TV, and we'll let it run. You do a b.u.m shot to introduce it, and I'll see what I can do for you. Fair's fair, I said. Do unto others. I've seen his b.u.m, and I can tell you it's not a pretty sight.'

'So what will happen?'

'We'll see on Monday,' says Bill Partington, grinning broadly and reaching out his paw for more nuts, but at that moment Patsy appears at a window, a cordless telephone in her hand, and calls, 'Bill! Bill! It's for you.'

He heaves himself up, stumps across the paving stones, leans across the flowerbed, grabs the phone. He yells into it. All of them hear every word. 'Eh? What? The I BA? The High Court? The Minister? What the f.u.c.k are you talking about, you a.r.s.ehole? Ah, come off it, you b.u.m. Fair's fair. You wait, lover boy. You wait. I've known Reggie since I was a boy. You'll get no change out of him. Eh? What?'

As his unseen interlocutor manages to arrest the flow, Bill paces expansively along the terrace, groaning loudly, and listening with pantomime impatience. He starts to tear at the ragged remains of what had once been a fair crop of brown curls. Then he breaks in again with, 'You swine! You b.u.m!'

Celia, her long brown legs neatly crossed at the ankles beneath her pretty soft hemline, rolls her eyes to the almost cloudless sky, and sighs in disa.s.sociation. Daniel smiles with undisguised delight. Nathan too is much pleased. Rosemary pretends to be reading a Sunday colour supplement, David buries his head in his hands, and Gogo rises to her feet and disappears into the house. Tennis guest Julian tries to start up a conversation with Daniel, but Daniel does not even notice: Julian is not bad at tennis but his views on anything other than opera are simply not worth listening to, and he wants to hear the end of Bill's tirade.

It comes abruptly, as the outraged dignitary yells a final oath of defiance, and presses the off b.u.t.ton. He slams the phone down on the inner window-ledge (thereby dislodging, though he does not notice this, a small vase of sweet peas). He returns to his chair, gleaming with the heat of battle, slumps down again, and says, 'Hope you enjoyed the cabaret!' Then he appears to fall into a sullen reverie, from which Daniel as host feels, after a moment or two, obliged to rescue him.

'Trouble, eh?' he suggests delicately. Bill Partington surfaces, blowing like a sea monster, and re-engages. He tries to explain the legal technicalities of the injunction, the legal technicalities with which d.i.c.k Champer seeks to thwart him, but the moment is past, and Daniel manages to divert him to other, less contumaceous matters.

Is it a form of retaliation that brings the demure Celia Partington to raise the subject of Frieda Haxby over the beans and bacon? She has read a piece somewhere during the last week or twoshe cannot remember where, was it in a magazine, the Spectator perhaps? about the fall-out from Frieda's VAT dispute. It seems that any victory she had claimed had been Pyrrhic, that new regulations were being drawn up to prevent further defences along the lines she had pursued. The grey area was being made light, to the taxman's advantage. 'Not always wise to challenge, is it?' suggests Celia. 'Even when one's morally in the right.'

None of them answers. Celia pursues.

'And is she still up on Exmoor? Has she any plans to return?' she innocently asks. 'Will you be visiting her this summer?'

Solidly the Palmers close ranks. Not a treacherous murmur escapes them. Frieda on Exmoor is as happy as can be, they all agree. Rosemary has been down to see her recently. The house is too large, but beautifully situated. Frieda is taking her time to do it up, but it will be splendid when it is finished. David and Gogo are off to see her next month. They're looking forward to it.

'We're hoping she'll invite us all for Christmas,' says Nathan wickedly. Rosemary sn.i.g.g.e.rs, Gogo looks severe, Daniel opens another bottle of Bulgarian, and Bill Partington belches, loudly, and pats his stained s.h.i.+rt front. The children have disappeared into the shrubbery. The man in the attic has come down to become the man in the garden shed. He too eats beans, shyly.

It is raining on Exmoor. Frieda Haxby Palmer sits in one of the many derelict rooms that look towards the sea, and listens to the rain on the roof. In better days this had been a garden room, where cream teas had been served. She cannot see the sea and the black rocks below, for rain obscures the steep combes. She can see only broken paving and the lawn and the abandoned flowerbeds and nettles and dodder and brambles. She has been out walking and now she dries her bare feet in front of a paraffin stove. (Rosemary had been right. It is wet here even in midsummer. It is almost always wet.) A wet dog dries by her side, and a pigeon sits at her feet in an upturned saucepan lid.

It is not a scene to comfort an anxious or a proud daughter. The room is full of junk. Suitcases, cardboard boxes, packing cases. Books and papers lie open on an old billiard table, on moth-eaten green-baize card-tables salvaged from the building's hotel life. On one, a game of clock patience is laid out, half played and abandoned. On a heavy mock-Jacobean sideboard stand three skulls, two animal (a badger and a sheep?) and one human. Their grim effect is softened by a cracked red Bristol gla.s.s vase holding a peac.o.c.k feather, a skeleton clock in a gla.s.s case, and a large alabaster egga nature morte, not a shrine or a cemetery. Paintings stand on the floor, their faces to the wall against the skirting board, their canvas backs and their labels of provenance exposed. Next to the alabaster egg lies a brown dried orange pierced at a shallow angle by a bone knitting needle. Now who would wish to torture an orange?

Frieda has been out walking this morning to Pollock Wood. She walks in all weathers. The dog, Bounce, has followed her. He is not her dog, but he goes where she goes. Old, black and white, shabby, disreputable, Bounce suits her well. Now he stinks and dries.

Beyond Turgot Common, on the upland, Frieda and Bounce had spotted a dying calf. It was lying in a ditch by a hedge. Its mother was standing near by, watching it and them without any expression of interest. The cow was big, brown, swollen. The calf was a pale dun pink, a naked skinny pink. It kept rearing and lifting its round ugly head from the sodden gra.s.s, then letting it slump down again, as though it were too heavy for its neck. Should she let the farmer now? She thought not. The farmer would not care. This much her hamburger researchthe research which had brought her to this ditchhad taught her. Farmers do not care. And she did not like the farmer. She did not like his thrumming generator, his barbed wire, his piles of old tyres, his heaps of slurry. Let the calf die in the wet. Bounc e had lowered his head, laid back his ears. Bounce put in no plea for the calf.

They had descended then, Frieda and Bounce, into Tippett's Wood, where they had seen a creature yet more dreadful than the calf. It was a sheep. Its matted pelt hung off it in lumps to trail upon the ground. Its wool was yellow-white, and it was stained with blotches of rusty red, the dirty dull red of dried menstrual blood. Its face was thin and shorn and quivering, its body shapeless beneath its ragged outgrowths. It gazed at the woman and the dog in misery. It was the sheep of affliction, the sheep of G.o.d. It gazed at them knowingly, then gazed away again. The dog whimpered with a slight fear. The woman stared back, recognizing it, recognizing herself. The scape sheep. It abandoned hope, and limped away, hobbling painfully slowly into the bracken, on its sodden footrot hoofbones. A rotten sheep, a subsidy sheep. The hillside rang with noisy water, and high overhead a yellow Wess.e.x rescue helicopter buzzed, on its way to search for lost travellers.

Frieda walked on through the ancient woodland. It spoke to her of decay, her own decay. The trees were encrusted with lichen, and small ferns sprouted from them, as orchids sprout from the trees of a tropical rain forest. Fungus grew from living holes and dying trunks and dead logs. Grey-white oyster outcrops cl.u.s.tered. Ash, birch, oak and thorn, the old trees of Northern Europe. Some leant from the steep slope at perilous angles, and others were uprooted, reaching their inverted crowns into the air like great matted discs of red ogre hair, of monstrous curling fibre. Twisted faces peered at her from severed, scarred and stunted limbs. She pa.s.sed the hollow tree, inside which stood a small lake on which a miniature elfin armada might sail. Scale was crazily distorted in this wracked and rent, this Rackham woodland. There was an overpowering smell of rich wet damp and decay. Stumps rose through the leafmould like old teeth. Frieda's tongue joggled her bridgework, and from beneath her loose bridge an acrid, bitter taste seeped into her mouth. It was the taste of death.

Then she had walked back to her fortress, the wet dog following, and now she sits there, amidst the spoils and bones of her history. She listens to the rain. It drums and drums, it ebbs then it strengthens, it gusts, it pours in heavy chains of water from the eves, it hangs in great drops on the salt-smeared window-pane. It pours and pours, but her eyes are dry. The sky weeps for her.

What is she doing here in her cavern? Well might her children wonder, well might the estate agent and the hamburger men have wondered. Chance had brought her but she has found a correspondence here, and here she has settled, to write her memoirs. Of course she is writing her memoirs. All her friends are writing their memoirs. At her age there is nothing much left to write, or so she might tell herself. (She is not as old as she pretends. She likes to meet disasters halfway, to get them over with.) She sits here, and addresses herself to her final questioning, her last revenge. This must be clear, she believes, even to her dim-witted family. She is here to summon her mother, her father, her sister, her husband from their graves and from their hiding places. As the Witch of Endor raised Samuel to terrify Saul, so she, the Witch of Exmoor, will raise Gladys Haxby, Ernest Haxby, Hilda Haxby, Andrew Palmer. Her nice clean ambitious well-educated offspring will be appalled by their hideous ancestry.

The problems with writing one's memoirs, she has discovered, include not only libel but also the unreliability of memory, the tedium of research. She has so little to go on. One of the vital sc.r.a.ps of evidence she herself burnt, long ago and, she suspects, criminally. There is not much doc.u.mentation of the Haxbys. One of the attractive aspects of Queen Christina's life had been the careful doc.u.mentation. Naturally Frieda had not really thought herself to be a reincarnation of Christina (nor in any way descended from herthe Haxbys came from Denmark, not Sweden, as any fool could work out, and anyway Christina was largely of German blood), but nevertheless she now thinks that her perverse and arbitrary obsession with this seventeenth-century monarch must have led her to this, her final quest. Well, she intends it to be her final quest. She is sick of everything and everyone, herself included, herself above all, and she can't see herself embarking on any new ventures after this. After this, she'll let others inherit the chaos.

Christina has given her a good run for her money, and Frieda had enjoyed her company. Frieda had followed Christina, from cauled and hairy birth through arrogant girlhood, through s.e.xual ambiguity and intellectual experiment, through free thinking and strategic conversions, through disguises and masquerades, to her old age in the Palazzo Riario in Rome. Frieda had followed her curious attachment to Descartes, which had in a manner killed him, and she had invented (evidence being lacking) a relations.h.i.+p with her French amba.s.sador Grotius, who had once escaped from prison in a box of books, and who died by s.h.i.+pwreck in her service. There had been much fun to be had with Christina in the colourful, swashbuckling, wide-gesturing seventeenth century, but her readers had not shared the fun, and had completely missed her subtle subtext on the theme of powerlessness and power. Not a single reviewer had even noted, let alone approved, her complex contrasting of the fates of Christina and her illiterate maid. Oh well, so what? 'I care for n.o.body, no, not I,' sang Frieda tunelessly to her dog Bounce, 'I care for n.o.body, no, not I, if n.o.body cares for me.' And the visit to Rome (legitimate research, all expenses offset against tax) had been most enjoyable. No wonder Christina had turned to Rome. It's a fine city.

Frieda had not been lying when she told the disc jockey, between tracks of UB40 and the Wreckers, that she had been moved to think herself in touch with Christina. Late at night, in the Mausoleum, she had had strange fancies. And here, on Exmoor, she has them too. Who is to say that one cannot put oneself in touch with an ancestral past? Her forebears had come across the North Sea from somewhere, as her mother had never tired of boasting, to settle in the flat lands.

Many times she had been to Sweden before Christina attracted her. She has had a long relations.h.i.+p with the country. Sweden had welcomed and honoured her. She had written of its iron workers in a study that had been much praised. And she had once, long ago, been in love with a Swede. They had sailed amongst the little islands together through one fine week of summer, and eaten crayfish on the sh.o.r.e. He had told her she was an honorary Swede, being possessed, as he was, by those famous national characteristics, selflove and love of solitude. He had also worn a das.h.i.+ng small moustache.