The Witch Of Exmoor Part 10

David was also worried about the implications of this shower of gold. The D'Angers had successfully disposed of their own small fortune, back home in Guyana (though it was rumoured, as ever in such families, that some portion of the family estate awaited reclamationa bauxite mine? a tropical valley? a plantation?). The D'Angers had not abandoned their homeland and survived the Burnham years to find themselves as heirs to the spoils of an English ploughman's daughter. David had been unfairly favoured by fortune already: she had heaped upon him the gifts of beauty and intelligence, and was she now to add to these the gross injustice of unearned wealth? All his adult life David had been striving to redress the injustices of that initial over-lavish distribution, and now fate had come in like a bad fairy in the shape of Frieda Haxby, to make his position yet more untenable. David had a position on capital gains tax, he had a position on inheritance rax, as he had once had a position on private dentistry: was it fair to test and to try him in this way? Had the testing of the D'Angers been Frieda's dark intention? Or had she been merely randomly irresponsible?

You will note that it did not occur to Gogo that Frieda had been affectionate, or generous, in the making of her will in her grandson's favour. Nor did Gogo see the inheritance as a blessing. Make of that what you wish.

The memory of the house at Ashcombe, during this first week or two, pressed down upon Gogo, hung over her like a storm cloud. What had her boy done to deserve to be threatened by this gloomy pile with its midden full of sh.e.l.ls and bones, its black fungi, its long-plundered Old Barrow, its leaking radon? Her boy was bright and beautiful, he was the future. This dump was the pit of the past out of which we may never never clamber. It sucks at our ankles, it pulls off and eats our shoes, it drags us under. Gogo went to the Bloomsbury Public Library in her lunch break, and found, in the dark nineteenth-century dinner-smelling gravy bas.e.m.e.nt of Topography, a County History, which told her that Ashcombe had in its grounds an old leper colony as well as an old kiln. She shuddered. She was not superst.i.tious, but she shuddered. And she discovered worse than that, worse than the lepers and the radon. She discovered rape and murder. She rang the estate agent in Taunton, to ask if she could speak to the young woman who had first showed Frieda round Ashcombehoping that in some way she could normalize Frieda's aberration, hoping to turn Frieda back into a harmless nature-loving eccentric who had chatted her way round the battlements in the spring sunshine with gay Amanda Posy. And the estate agents told her that Amanda Posy was dead. Twenty-seven, and dead. Had they not heard? Amanda Posy had been killed by a man posing as a client. She had shown him round a house up in the woods behind Luxborough, and he raped her, throttled her and buried her in Treborough Tip. A copycat killing. A newsprint death. There had been a spate of estate agent killings and abductions. Amanda Posy was one of several.

Gogo was appalled by this discovery. It prompted her to action. She rang Daniel, who was staying up in Madock, and asked him how he was getting on with the question of probate. Had he managed to get a copy of the earlier will out of old Mr Partridge? Were there reasonable grounds for disputing the Goltho & Goltho will? She very much hoped there were.

Daniel, not sure what Gogo was playing at, but eager to exploit what seemed to him to be an excess of generosity on her part, confirmed that there would certainly be grounds for disputing Goltho & Goltho, who were known in the profession for practices both sharp and slack, but that Mr Partridge was not very happy about releasing the terms of the former will until death and cause of death were established.

'Not a very good situation, at the moment,' said Daniel, with a hint of question in his tone. If he got Gogo to agree over the phone that Frieda's last will and testament was unfair, would she stick to it, and would her opinion stand up in court? But Gogo had jumped quickly to the next stage.

'But until we see the other will, how can we be sure it's not even worse? She might have left everything to the Cats' Home. Or to the Exmoor National Park. Or to that ghastly chap Cedric. I'd rather Benjie got it than Cedric.'

Daniel said nothing to this, though he noted it. He promised to pursue the solicitor. He promised to ring Mr Rorty about the progress of the investigation, to check if the paths to the old kiln had been thoroughly searched.

'And one last thing,' said Gogo. 'That computer she had there. I think we should remove it, don't you? Who knows what might be in it? Rosemary says she knows how to work it. I think we should get it back to London.'

Can you feed your will to the Internet? Can you send it through Cybers.p.a.ce? Can you send your money out to the stars?

The news of his good fortune seeps through to Benjamin. He overhears conversations. His cousins telephone him. At first it does not seem to affect him much, but slowly he begins to sink. Imperceptibly, the poison fills the bloodstream. He grows silent at home and in cla.s.s. He rejects his food, he bites his lips anxiously. He is wary and withdrawn. Mrs Nettleship, his cla.s.s teacher, notes the change in his behaviour, but puts it down to adolescence. Boys do get moody at this age.

Fools' gold, fairy gold. Lying awake late one night, sick with anxiety, Benjamin remembers that withered orange on Frieda's cabinet. The bone needle had been stuck through it, from Britain to Guyana. She had skewered him, transfixed him. What is he to do? What has she demanded?

His aunt Rosemary is ill also, though she has not yet found a way of pinning her sickness upon Frieda. The prim and dapper doctor is interested in her case but has not yet come up with an explanation. He gazes at the lurches of the print-out of her erratic pressure chart with a neutral expression of respect. He sends her to clinics where she offers her arm for the extraction of vials of blood and her urine in small jars for testing. He prescribes pills and tells her to eat less salt. Rosemary cannot tell from his demeanour whether hers is an everyday problem, or whether she is on the eve of kidney dialysis. He has shown an excessive interest in her kidneys. She a.s.sumes there must be something wrong with them. She does not confide her fears to anyone. She tells herself that she has two kidneys, and that they cannot both be failing at once. Can they?

Rosemary is a fastidious woman. She greatly dislikes the feel of alien fingers upon her body, the sight of specimens of her own body fluids in bottles. The blobs of cold jelly upon her wired b.r.e.a.s.t.s and heart disgust her. Her heart throbs with indignation. She can see it pulsing angrily like a green volcano on a television screen. She dreads that she will be asked to mount a public treadmill. She is a Private Patient, but not all processes are private. She does not trust the clinic's procedures. She has heard too many cases of mixed results, mislabelled diagnoses. Every news bulletin on the radio brings some new medical scandal. One is at the mercy. She takes to writing her name in large print on every piece of paper, every test result, every ECG or Blood Test Request. She does not trust the numbers.

Rosemary's spirits are not good, but she conceals the causes of her short temper. Her husband Nathan sympathetically a.s.sumes that she is worried about work, for he is worried about work himself. He and his firm have taken on a brave task and he is not sure if he is up to his part in it. Renfrew & Wincobank are to update the corporate image of the National Health Service.

'Update' is the word that is used: 'alter' is what is meant. It has become clearer, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, that we cannot afford a National Health Service for everybody, all the time. Some may have kidney transplants and some may not. Some may have their varicose veins tended, and some may not. Some may live to be ninety, and some may not. So we must alter the perceptions of the people. We must adjust their expectations. We must encourage private health insurance. We must persuade the community-minded, the socially aware, the meddling middle-cla.s.s egalitarians, the David D'Angers of this world, that it is their social duty to save resources by paying into the pockets of insurance companies, in order to release funds for the sick and the poor. We must teach the poor and the sick that they cannot have what they want. We must rea.s.sure the rich that they have a right to have what they want provided that they pay so much for it that the surgeons, the anaesthetists, the pharmacists, the insurance brokers, the insurance companies and the shareholders all get what they want too. And they want a lot. They want at least ten times more than the hotly disputed, oft-rejected and as yet fictional Minimum National Wage. Some of them want and expect a hundred times as much. This makes health care very expensive indeed, and ever more inaccessible. There is no justice, no equity in this situation. n.o.body would choose this if their eyes were veiled by ignorance, for each of us knows that we may pull the short straw. We can't all imagine being poor, but we can all imagine being disastrously, expensively, prohibitively ill. Nathan's powers of invention and persuasion will be stretched to the limit.

Nathan Herz finds himself curiously depressed. He knows he ought to find the gross effrontery of his brief to deceive the nation a challenge, but it doesn't inspire. Building up the corporate image or ident.i.ty of an insurance company, or a shipping line, or a bank, can be amusing. But health is depressing. However many suggestions for happy images of healthy children and smiling nurses and hotel-foyer-receptionists he generates, Nathan cannot forget that his own father died in his fifties, after a short life of overwork. He died on a street corner. Many of his blood had died in the camps. Thinking about Health turns Nathan's thoughts to Death. For however you package the whole thing up, however many Healthy Smart Cards and Credit Points and poster campaigns and little TV ad-dramas you invent, Death is where it ends. If you're lucky, you can afford to die in a clean bed. If you're notwell, there's the street corner. Man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets. Ecclesiastes 12:5. An atavistic Jewish melancholy seeps through Nathan, and at times he enjoys it. At least it is better than all this febrile pretence that we are all having such a good time and will have it for ever. Looking around a restaurant at the munchers, he thinks to himself: in thirty years most of you will be dead. You can chomp away, but you can't devour Death. If you pay those spiralling insurance costs, you may be able to die privately, on individually ground mince and personalized liquidized slops, but it's going to cost you a packet. And you may not be able to afford even that.

He finds himself wondering how it will be for him. He cannot help wondering how it was for Belle. Slow, sudden, hopeless, hopeful? Had she struggled or had she gone under quietly? He wonders if Belle had been Jewish. He knows nothing of her family, nor does he wish to. Belle had been a happy soul. She hadn't been rich, or famous, or extravagantly talented, but she had been happy. So it could be done. But how?

Nathan and Rosemary are not happy. Would winning the lottery make them so? Would a successful challenge to Frieda's will make them so? Rosemary begins to think that nothing can make her happy again but the purchase of some new kidneys. They are not yet available for sale either on or off the National Health, but Nathan will surely be able to get round that little problem for her. He can recover the trading instincts of his ancestors, and buy some in from Bangladesh. Surely any husband would be glad to do that for his young and pretty wife? It is not much to ask. Quite a small organ. Quite a young wife.

Nathan dreams he is back in Venice, a city he loves above all others. The water of the ca.n.a.ls laps upon the mossy steps. The steps lead down, oh so easily, so graciously, with so sweet an invitation, into the water. The water laps and sucks, sucks and laps. The green weed stirs and rises, rises and falls, like tresses of green hair. Steps of yellow, grey and pink, scooped by age, scooped and fretted by the ceaseless gentle tide. One could step into eternity. One could embark from these steps for the Orient, for one's Long Home. Nathan loves ca.n.a.l paintings, marine painting?. Ca.n.a.letto, Guardi, Turner, Claude Lorrain. The little frisking waves of the harbour, the steps, the temples, the prospects, the far horizons. We have said that Nathan has no taste, but that is not true. He does have taste, but he does not have taste that he can afford. He does not like modern paintings. He could put up with a Hockney swimming-pool and palm trees, but what he wants are Ca.n.a.letto, Guardi, Turner, Claude Lorrain.

He wakes, with the sound of the Thames lapping in his ears beyond the double glazing. He has always loved the water's edge, although he cannot swim. He wakes, and wonders: could he market, not life, not health, but death? Could one take upon oneself the challenge of changing the corporate ident.i.ty of death?

He thinks of Frieda Haxby, in her kingdom by the sea. Her coast is too wild for him. She has drowned in too savage a spot. He prefers the city steps.

Benjamin D'Anger's health deteriorates. Gogo takes him to the doctor, who can find nothing wrong. Perhaps he has been working too hard at school? He takes his schoolwork so seriously, for a boy of his age. He should get out and about, enjoy himself more, not frowst indoors over his books.

Simon Palmer is not in good shape either. He has not been home since the summer, so n.o.body has noticed the change. Nor would they have been able to interpret it, had they seen him. His tutor notes that he's not been turning in any essays recently, indeed hasn't been seen round much at all, and resolves to have a word with him about it, but he himself is in the middle of an expensive divorce fuelled by a drink problem, and he never gets round to it. He drinks a bottle of Scotch a day instead, and thinks himself heroic.

Emily Palmer, far away in Florence, worries about her mother and her grandmother. She is fond of them both. But what can she do about it? She alone is of the hope that Frieda is alive and well. She imagines Frieda sitting in a bar in Georgetown in the sweltering heat, or travelling upriver amongst the piranha fish and jaguars to see the mountains of gold. She thinks this would be admirable. She herself has for some time taken the line that family life is destructive, and she has decided to detach herself from it. And if Grandma has done the samewell, good on her.

Daniel Palmer cannot be so relaxed. The demands of river pollution prevent him from devoting too much time to Frieda, but he pursues old Howard Partridge, who had been Frieda's solicitor for many decades, who dated back to the days when Andrew Palmer had been upon the scene. (Daniel, unlike his sisters, has authentic though not very rea.s.suring memories of his father. Meal-times of shepherd's pie. A walk along a towpath. A visit to a museum. Walt Disney's Fantasia, at the Romley Gaumont.) Howard Partridge, now retired, is an old stonewaller. He has not forgiven Frieda for pursuing the VAT case against his own advice and for coming near to winning it. He cannot resist pointing out to Daniel, over the telephone, that the consequences of Frieda's legal action against Customs & Excise have been unfortunate for other clients who have found themselves in her position. Far from establishing a helpful precedent, she had caused HM Customs & Excise to close a useful loophole. And no, he cannot divulge the contents of her will without proper authority. I am the proper authority, Daniel is on the point of saying, but then it occurs to him that maybe old Partridge knows more than he'll let on. Maybe he is in touch with Andrew Palmer. The possibility of this shocks Daniel, and he puts the handset down with a sick dismay.

Some news, after days of waiting, comes out of Exmoor. The cliff paths above and leading down to the old kiln have been searched, without successno corpse, or signs of disturbance there, apart from a few cigarette ends and the wrapping from a Kit-Kat. But Mrs Haxby Palmer's friend Jane Todd has turned up and been interviewed by the local police and by Mr Rorty. She is upset about her new friend's disappearance and simply cannot account for it. She would be happy to come up to town to talk to the family about Frieda, as she can well imagine how worried they must all be feeling. She has to come up to town in a couple of days to see an exhibition and attend a lecture at the Cochrane Gallery: would they care to set a time to see her?

Daniel, Gogo and Rosemary agree that they are all intrigued by the existence of this Exmoor friend. Who can Jane Todd be, and how can she and Frieda ever have got together? Patsy, who has spoken to her on the phone, says that she sounds very pleasant and very ordinary. 'You know,just ordinary. Not Mummerset or anything.Just ordinary.'

This is even more curious. Daniel regrets that he cannot make lunch on the day in question, but both Gogo and Rosemary converge upon the ordinary little Italian restaurant in St Martin's Lane which Rosemary has selected as an appropriate meeting place. They get there early, to be ready for their guest, and are discussing kidney transplants when they see her approaching their reserved table. There is no mistaking the lady from Exmoor. She is wearing a good suit in a bold grid of bobbled green and heather tweed, enlivened by a sporting scarlet fleck. She has polished brogues, and a felt hat with a feather in it. She carries a highly polished maroon leather bag with a gold clasp and a gold chain. She is autumnal, and her face is delicate and soft and wrinkled and faded. She smiles at them vaguely, sits herself down, introduces herself, as she accepts a gin and tonic.

'I'm Jane Todd, from Exford,' she says. 'This is so worrying. So very very worrying. I did like your mother. Such a nice woman.'

Her vague smile flitters, pleasantly. She has sharp blue eyes, pepper-and-salt hair, and gentle folds of becoming chin. She b.u.t.ters her roll vigorously.

She had met Frieda, she tells them, in a pub in Simonsbath. Both had been taking lunch while sheltering from heavy rain. She herself had been out walking and collecting specimens'I do a little botanizing, just as a hobby'and had been examining an ivy-leaved bellflower through a hand lens when Frieda had introduced herself, and asked the name of the plant. They'd got chatting, and Jane had been most interested to learn that Frieda lived at Ashcombe, for she'd known the house in the old days. She could remember it as a hotel, and then again when it had been inhabited, briefly, by a Mr Silver from Vermont. They had talked about the house, and its curious history, and Frieda had asked her to come round for a drink one day. And so they had become friends. They'd had lunch out together several timesthey'd discovered another pub which did a cheap Thursday lunch for pensioners, and thought its landlord needed their support. Frieda had been interested in Exmoor stories, and she herself had known the area all her life, though she'd lived abroad for years. Yes, she was widowed, and retired there now. Frieda had been to her cottage on a couple of occasions, and admired her botanical drawings. Jane Todd was interested in botanical drawing, had built up her own collection, was off to see this new show at the Cochrane. The flora of Alberta. With a talk by Montague Porter. Frieda had known quite a lot about flora. But of course, they would know that, wouldn't they?

Gogo and Rosemary, making their way silently through their penne all' ambbiata, had exchanged glances. Was this woman that Jane Todd knew really their wayward monster mother? Jane Todd made her sound quite usual. But then, on closer examination, Jane Todd herself was not as usual as she looked. It emerged that her husband had been an exploreryes, an old-fashioned sort of explorer. Jane had travelled with him on many occasions. She could say she had seen the world. She and Frieda had exchanged travellers' tales.

Jane Todd could not believe that Frieda had simply vanished. The last time she'd seen her she'd been so well. They'd had their lunch, then gone for a walk through the woods to the County Gate, talking of Arthur Rackham, and fairy stories. They'd both been brought up on Rackham. Then they'd gone on together to Minehead to look at the charity shops. They'd discovered that they both enjoyed nosing around in charity shops. Frieda had been most impressed by the quality of the stuff you could find in the West Country. Not that she wanted to buy much, for both she and Jane had reached the age where they had enough stuff to last them a lifetimebut they liked to look. Frieda had professed herself interested in the economics of this new barter system, this late-twentieth-century rural by-product of an unprecedented mixture of affluence, indigence, unemployment, underemployment and a crazy rating system. Frieda had said that she was thinking of writing a book about it. So they called their visits 'research'. Jane would report her findings to Frieda, and Frieda would report hers to Jane. 'Now look at my hat,' commands Jane Todd.

They look at her hat.

'I got that from the Spastics,' says Jane Todd proudly. 'You wouldn't have guessed that, would you?'

'And my bag,' continues Jane Todd, 'is Cystic Fibrosis.' They gaze at her bag. It shines and swells.

Oh dear, laments Jane, she would miss Frieda. There weren't so many like-minded people on Exmoor.

She was so sorry she'd been so long getting in touch. She'd been in Cornwall, visiting a friend who'd just had a hip op. She only heard the news when she got back. Oh dear what a worry.

Jane Todd did not look very worried. Her morbidity quotient seemed surprisingly low. She was much more interested in pink toothwort and monogrammed silver teaspoons and second-hand hand-knitted Fair Isle pullovers than in sudden deaths, drownings, suicides. She was a very unprying person. When asked if she herself had a family, she hardly seemed to know the answer. Yes, she thought she did have a son and a couple of daughters and a few grandchildren, but she couldn't quite remember where they were these days. Or that was the impression she gave.

Gogo could see that this indifference would have appealed to Frieda.

They agreed, after her departure for Paddington, that her evidence was little help. She could testify to the fact that Frieda, on recent sightings, had seemed cheerful and of sound mind, but that got them nowhere. It could perhaps be used in court to try to establish that Frieda's last will and testament was not the ravings of a mad old woman of the moor, but they would leave that to Daniel to pursue. Should it come to that. Both had noted that Jane Todd had made no mention of a houseboy called Will Paine, or of any other inhabitants or visitors to Ashcombe. Frieda and Jane had seemed to dwell in a remote, unpeopled, fantastical world, detached from human history by age and much wandering, content with trees and rocks and roots and bell-flowers.

Jane Todd, at the Cochrane Gallery, listened intently to the lecture on the flora of Alberta, and watched keenly as slide followed slide. It all went in one ear and eye and out the other, but for the s.p.a.ce of an hour her eyes were pleasantly occupied by saskatoon and choke-cherry, by monkshood and harebell and gentian, by scarlet mallow and snow b.u.t.tercups and mountain forget-me-not, by Indian paintbrush and asters of purple and gold.

THE CAVE OF GLOOM.

Frieda's body was recovered three weeks later, washed up twenty miles along the coast off Rampion Point. For more than a month she had ebbed and flowed with the steep tides of the Bristol Channel and the grey swell of the wintry Atlantic. To Lundy she had drifted, and back again, to rest at last on a rocky promontory, at the foot of the iron cliff. Mackerel in the salt water and seabirds and ravens and crabs on the sh.o.r.e had feasted upon her. Her prophecy came to pa.s.s, for she was identified not by the scar on her thigh but by the bridgework in her skull. Her scar had been sucked and nibbled away by countless plucking mouths. Her bridgework, loose though it was, had not been washed away. It clung to her jaw. Obstinacy and paranoia had perished, with all other qualities, but the bridge had hung on. The coastguard at Ilfracombe, who recovered what was left of Frieda Haxby Palmer, had known her at once. He had been on the look-out for her. He had felt she was coming his way. He had programmed the charts of tide and wind and weather, and had expected her to come to him. He had waited, and she had come.

He had to send a man down the cliff on a rope's end to collect her. She was bundled into a bodybag, and hoisted up amidst the crying gulls. He rang the police of both counties, wondering which would claim her. Somerset prevailed over Devon, and Somerset rang Derbyshire to inform Daniel Palmer.

There would be an inquest, Daniel told Gogo and Rosemary.

It is not pleasant to think of one's mother so long in the icy sea. Even Frieda's undutiful son and daughters felt the force of this, and could not inhibit their imaginings. But for Benjamin, her heir, her chosen one, the news was ghastly. He took to his bed and would not, could not move. His teeth chattered as with a high fever, although he was as cold as any stone. Gogo sat by his bedside and wept.

There was no hope now of concealment. The newspapers picked up the tragedy, and picked up Frieda's connections. The well-prepared obituaries were long. Her rogue reputation was a.s.sessed and rea.s.sessed. Reporters rang Patsy and Nathan and David D'Angeir. The story of Will Paine reached the press, and for a while the Identikit drawing resurfaced. Had Frieda Haxby Palmer been murdered? Had she been pushed off a cliff? Had she jumped off a cliff? Journalists made their way to Ashcombe and described it in Gothic prose. It made a good story. The names of Cedric Summerson and one or two others in high or public places were stirred into the brew. Had M15 been involved? Or the CIA?

None of her family welcomed these attentions, and indeed they were not well meant. David D'Anger was accustomed to finding himself the target of the right-wing, but not to finding the chaste and austere name of his wife dragged into the attacks; nor was he at all happy with some of the innuendoes about the private aspects of his working life. n.o.body had yet dared to call him a playboy of the media, or to link his name with that of Lola Belize of CNN, but he could see danger ahead. Nathan was not best pleased by mocking references to his occupational practices (lunches, dinners, clubs and nights on the town), and Rosemary knew that, for her, this was ic. The arts were on principle loathed by most of the press, and as a representative of the arts she was savagely derided: she would not be forgiven for the attention she had unwittingly drawn to herself. Daniel, whose case, like the Wash itself, wound on for ever, a.s.sured them from Cheshire that the whole business was a storm in a teacup, that Frieda's death would be forgotten in a week, but privately he prayed that there would be no more incriminating faxes from Will Paine.

So far the three Palmer children had stuck together in the face of this unwanted exposure, but all sensed that this solidarity could not last. Gone were those pleasant weekends of tennis and conversat ion in Hampshire, those West End theatre evenings arranged by Nathan Herz, those inconclusive but pleasant plans for weeks in Italy. There would be no family Christmas this year: Christmas would never come again in its old form.

Frieda had ruined it all. Jessica and Jonathan knew that they would never play the Game again. Disaster had come upon them.

Old Howard Partridge no longer had any excuse for not digging out Frieda's penultimate will, but when he produced it it solved nothing. It posed yet more problems, as Daniel, who had first sight of it, knew he should have known it would. It had been no less arbitrary and malicious than her last: indeed in many ways it was much worse. She had named as her executors her recently retired but still sprightly literary agent Bertram Goldie, and Lord Ogden, a heavy-weight legal bruiser now enjoying a comfortable autumn life of overeating as Master of Grotius College in Cambridge. (Daniel, seeing Ogden's name in the doc.u.ment, recalled that Frieda had sat on the Ogden Committee on something or otherEqual Opportunity? Industrial Espionage? The North Sea Bed?) Goldie and Ogden had been her executors, and the will which they had agreed to execute had left 20,000 to each of her children and to each grandchild a thousand pounds. So far, so good. But she had left the rest of her estate and all her copyrights in trust to her son-in-law David D'Anger, for the purpose of re-establishing the D'Anger family claim to the Valley of the Eagles, and establishing therein the Just Society, to be founded on the principles of social justice, as discussed. There was a lot more about this Society and its trustees, in small print, along with mentions of the Demerara case and the rest.i.tution of economic and cultural rights in Guyana. There was even a mention of the Boston Tea Party. Daniel was so enraged by all this codswallop that he could not bring himself to read it carefully, and he could see at a glance why Howard Partridge had not wished to divulge it. How could any reputable lawyer have allowed himself to be a party to such a doc.u.ment? What could old Ogden have been thinking of? What had David D'Anger been up to? If this wasn't a sign of undue influence on an unsound mind, then it would be hard to know what was. The prospect of young Benjamin D'Anger winning the lot began to seem almost acceptable, in comparison with this deliberate, money-wasting nightmare. Daniel does not believe in concepts. He believes, or so he thinks, in people. And Benjamin is, at least, a person.

There is no way of keeping the contents of this doc.u.ment away from the other family members, although Daniel has been the first to see them. Daniel is not sure how to dress them up. He is in a cruel dilemma which he begins to think the wicked Frieda must have foreseen. Shall he go for the second will, on the grounds of its superior clarity and sanity, or for this earlier garbage, on the grounds that there is more money in it for him and the Herzes, and that a subsequent appeal could successfully challenge the excessive D'Anger share and hand it back for equal redistribution amongst the next-of-kin? Would a successful challenge to the first will reinstate the disqualified second will? These are complex legal points.

David decides to be bold and to speak to Nathan. Nathan is supposed to be a practical man, a man of business (though Daniel has at times had his doubts about this). He rings at seven in the morning from his Holiday Inn in Chester, and reads out to him the offending paragraphs. To his dismay Nathan laughs heartily, though not very happily, and says that although he could do with 20,000 right now, he can't think that all that Just Society nonsense could stand up in a court of law. Yet he agrees that it would simply waste Frieda's posthumous income if they were to challenge it. Better to let Goltho & Goltho give it to little Benjie, says Nathan. He's a nice boy, maybe he'll help us out in our old age. 'The Just Society,' repeats Nathan, with finely dramatized incredulity. 'She might as well have left it to the Conversion of the Jews!' And is it possible, he pursues, after a moment's pause, to leave your money to a cause that doesn't exist?

Daniel, who has been lying awake for most of the night, tossing in his flat tight sheets, watching the red digital clock flick soundlessly onwards, has his answer. 'Yes,' he says with neat precision. 'Yes, it is. Bernard Shaw left his to a new alphabet, remember. And Old Hutch Hutchinson of Derby left his to found the London School of Economics. Shaw's will was successfully challenged, but the LSE is there all right. It was cobbled together by the trustees over a breakfast party near G.o.dalming, if I remember rightly.'

'But come off it,' says Nathan. 'The Just Society! What a freak idea! Now if she'd wanted to found a Society for the Promotion of Social Justice, that would have been different. Everybody says they believe in Social Justice. The words mean nothing. But the Just Society? Whoever heard of such a thing?'

Daniel is not sure if this is helpful, but it is smart. The wording is indeed such that it would be hard to sanction any monies being handed over on its terms by David D'Anger to the Labour Party or any other known organization. Can David himself know what is meant by the Just Society? Is it some agreement between David and Frieda? Had they cooked this up together? (Daniel dimly remembers that there had been some bending of the terms in the Hutchinson-LSE casehadn't Hutch originally left nothing to his family, and everything to the cause of Socialism? Was it Sidney Webb who had sorted that one out to everyone's satisfaction? Or was it that unworldly lunatic Shaw again?) Nathan, on the end of the line by the Thames, is now wide awake, and is beginning to take a keener interest in the philosophical and legal conundrum which Daniel has sprung upon him. He unhelpfully reminds Daniel that the Ethical Society and the National Secular Society and the Philosophical Society and the British Humanists and even the Gay British Humanists are all bona fide organizations, probably even charitable organizations, to which one could legally leave one's entire fortune, though it is hard to know how ethics or secularism or philosophy or humanism would benefit from such a bequest. And is justice a concept more vague, more immaterial than ethics or humanism? It would be odd if it were, says Nathan. How would one set about founding a Just Society, Nathan begins to speculatewould it be a society for justice, or a society to discuss justice, or a society that practised justice? Had Frieda's will spelt any of this out? Perhaps the Just Society could spend its time playing variations on the Veil of Ignorance? How had Sidney Webb got the London School of Economics off the ground? How had he got from a breakfast party at G.o.dalming to bricks and mortar in the Aldwych?

'By lectures,' says Daniel tersely. He is beginning to regret interesting Nathan in this topic. 'He set up courses of lectures.'

'Well, there you are, there's your answer. Frieda's money could all be spent on lectures on social justice. Or on social justice research projects. I bet they cost a pretty penny.'

'I can't think that was quite what she had in mind,' says Daniel.

'Anyway, whatever she had in mind, she seems to have thought better of it,' says Nathan. 'She decided to give it all to Benjamin instead.'

Daniel's breakfast has arrived, on a tray. He pours himself a cup of coffee, his mind beginning to meander from Frieda's wills to his river case.

'It sounds to me', says Nathan, 'as though we'd better let Benjie scoop the jackpot. With as good a grace as we can muster. I'm going to buy myself a bonanza break of lottery tickets today. Do you play the lottery, Daniel?'

'Certainly not,' says Daniel with austerity.

'Well, keep me briefed,' says Nathan.

Daniel rings off. Daniel eats his cooling eggs.

Daniel, it should be understood, is a man of probity. He is, if you like, a Just Man. But his is the justice of the law. He is a man of the law. He dislikes muddles. In part of his mind he knows that it is unlikely that David D'Anger had suborned Frieda Haxby in the hope of personal gain. Nevertheless, he will never trust David D'Anger or his sister Gogo again. They are contaminated by his mother's caprice.

His river case has disclosed a startling amount of contamination and corruption. Pollution, greed and dirty money have been flowing through four counties. Infection has run downstream, killing fish and decency, gathering momentum, until it flowed into the dirty sea. There have been lies, there have been legal evasions and tax evasions. There have been gestures and posturings. One of the alleged polluters has been seen recently on television, dashing down a clear tumbler of water taken from the River Wash as it flows through the backyard of one of his factories. 'The champagne of Staffordshire!' he had declared to the camera. Daniel does not like this kind of posturing, which has become so popular in the television age. It has corrupted us all. It had even corrupted the austere Frieda. For what had Timon's feast been but a gesture without cameras, borrowed from the minister who fed his daughter on hamburgers for the entertainment of the nation?

Daniel drinks his metallic orange juice, and takes himself to the bathroom to shave. As he gazes at himself in the mirror he wonders if he is beginning to resemble his father.

Had Frieda committed suicide, and if so, what was the law relating to the estate of suicides? Daniel does not believe that Will Paine pushed Frieda off a cliff, but he thinks it possible that Frieda may have jumped. Death by misadventure, the inquest had concluded, but what if Frieda had known herself to be fatally ill? Might she not well have jumped? Daniel has now had time to study the letter that Frieda had received from the National Radiological Protection Board at Didcot, and has discovered that the radon level at Ashcombe, calculated at 850 Bq m-3, is way above the national average of 20 Bq m-3 and way above the danger level of 200. Her house had been full of Radon's daughters. No wonder the NRPB had urged action. The DoE pamphlet had also stressed that 'cigarette smoking, which is the dominant cause of lung cancer, aggravates the risk of lung cancer from radon exposure'. Frieda had taken up smoking, she had lost weight, she had developed a cough. Had she therefore jumped into the sea? Such a leap would have been in character. She had a habit of taking precipitate action, of meeting trouble before it met her.

Daniel has not disclosed the radon information to anybody. The letter had stated that it was confidential, and would not be disclosed to anyone else without written permission. Nevertheless, the legal implications had sprung to Daniel's mind as soon as he had seen the label on the Jiffy bag, and the last sentence of the letter confirms his suspicions. It had instructed Frieda that tenants, landlords and owner-occupiers of radon-infected dwellings should consult p. 4 of the Guide. This stated that an owner-occupier had no legal obligation to disclose the results to anyone, but that such a person 'should take advice about contractual matters'.

Daniel decides not to disclose anything to anybody. Or not yet.

Who would wish to buy Ashcombe, with or without its radon?

If Gogo D'Anger had shivered at the news of Frieda's second will, the Goltho & Goltho will which left all to Benjie, David D'Anger is struck with horror and guilt at the news of the first, which had left so much to The Just. For he has been directly responsible for this madness. Innocent of intent, as he himself and he alone knows, but nevertheless responsible. The perils of conversation, the dangers of philosophy, the pitfalls of speculation! Many hours over the years he had spent in discussion with Frieda Haxby, but it had never occurred to him that she took his ideas seriously. He had a.s.sumed it was all a game. She had never seemed to condone his interests. Indeed, she had mocked them, had made fun of them. And now she had called his bluff. She had asked him to press the b.u.t.ton. At least, to be fair, she had thought of asking him to press the b.u.t.ton. And then she had given him up and thought better of it. She had given him up, as he now gives up himself. But with what disastrous consequences! He had so prided himself on his Palmer alliance, he had cherished his friendly relations. But Frieda Haxby had sown perpetual dissension like dragon's teeth. She had set her family at war.

He replays his encounters with Frieda, and she appears before him in her protean forms. Girlish in Indian print, as she walked down the towpath past the houseboats near Nuffield in Oxford, on the day that he and Gogo had announced their plans to marry. (She had taken a piece of bread from her large bag to feed the ducks.) Stout in green silk at his wedding in the gardens of Gladwyn, champagne in hand, holding court to dons and divines and a.s.sembled D'Angers from three continents. Eating a plateful of spaghetti in their Highbury flat, and holding the infant Benjamin in her arms as she uttered prophecies over him. Appearing with David himself and an MEP and a Minister of Agriculture on a programme about British sugar production. Accompanying David and the Minister round the sugar factory at Scalethwaite, inspecting steel silos amidst the fetid smell of cooking beet. Celebrating her sixtieth birthday at a large party at the Conservatory at the Barbican amidst tropical plants and orchidsthe nearest I could get to Guyana, she had joked.

At Timon's feast in Romley. In her tea-gown at Ashcombe.

And now, most vividly, most ominously returns to him the memory of another meeting. She appears to him as she had appeared on that ill-fated night three years agothree years, four years, five years ago?in Toronto. He had not even known she was in Canada, let alone in the same building, and had been startled to see his mother-in-law emerge from the make-up room of the s.p.a.ce-age television studio where he was waiting to take part in a live TV phone-in on communitarianism and multiculturalism in Quebec and the UK. There she was, Frieda Haxby herself, curiously highly coloured, her grey hair puffed by eager fingers into a great crest. She had greeted him with a screech of delight, and informed him that she herself was to speak about the sensational discovery of the Swansberg Stone, an archaeological find which, if its runes proved authentic, would push back the date of Viking settlement in North America by some hundred years. She was as proud of this stone as if she had discovered it herself, as if she had been one of the first Viking seafarers to cross the Atlantic. And she was proud too of her glamorous son-in-law. How pleased they had been to see one another, amongst the alien crowd!

Though David, as he explained to Frieda in the back of a Beck cab on their way to the Harborfront Hotel where both were staying, did not find Toronto alien. It allowed for him, as it allowed for the many. David D'Anger admired Toronto and Trudeau. Toronto had received over the decades Vikings and Vietnamese, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Italians and Indians, and had made them all welcome. Toronto was a young city, it had no old age, no middle ages. It had made its own contracts. How fortunate, to start so late in history, without the baggage of Britain. So they had mused, as they sat drinking in a slowly revolving bar high above the bright lights, the lake, the islands. They had talked of post-colonialism, of Guyana, of vanished empires, of rising empires, of the Pax Americana. They had talked, alas, too much, of too many thingsof communism and perpetual revolution, of socialism in one country, of Stalin and Trotsky, of Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, of Coleridge and Pantisocracy, of the slow death of the vision of the just. Oh, it lingers on, David had said, this vision, artificially protected by university grants in departments of political theory, but n.o.body believes in it any more. Capitalism and the free market had triumphed. Only a poet or a fool or a philosopher would speak of justice now.

The bar revolved very, very slowly, almost imperceptibly, as they drank their way through the night. And Frieda had probed him about new theories of social contract, about the possibility or impossibility of conceiving of a society as a closed system isolated from all other societies. Could one set up a just state in isolation? And could it survive? How quickly would it deteriorate? Would human nature itself change if society were changed from the roots? Could one eradicate the motive of greed? And is envy, as some philosophers have argued, an unnatural by-product of inequality? Or is it innate? And if innate, is it useful?

Frieda had been taken by the idea of an experimental society, as others had been before her. You'd need time, she had concluded, in order to see it work through the generations. Time, and an isolated location. Guyana, she pointed out, would do well. Surely Professor Challenger could have discovered the Just Society up the Oronoque, instead of the dinosaurs? Wouldn't David himself like to have a crack at it? This she had asked him, on top of the Harborfront Hotel, after a third of a bottle of Scotch, and he had said yes. Who would have thought that this conversation, and that fatal phrase, would have lodged in Frieda's maverick imagination? Whyever had he told her about the Sixth Form Society he had founded at school, of his attempts to re-establish it at Oxford! It had only been a talking club, a discussion group, a game. They hadn't meant to do anything. Had they? How could she have even thought of leaving money to the Just Society? As soon finance yet another expedition to raise the t.i.tanic, or to dive for pirate gold amongst the hammer-headed sharks of Cocos Island!

David D'Anger knows that the Just Society is an impossibility, that his brain cannot even conceive of it, as it cannot conceive of heaven or of h.e.l.l. But he does not like to know that he knows it. He does not like to know that mankind and womankind are envious, greedy, violent and insincere.

They had gone late to their beds, that night in Toronto, high, drunk, over-stimulated, jet-lagged. Had their difference in age been less embarra.s.sing they would have slept together. At least David had been spared that memory. He knows that Frieda would have been willing. But the rest of the night had been bad enough. He had felt the whole room revolve as he lay in bed watching the revolving stories and advertis.e.m.e.nts and self-advertis.e.m.e.nts of CNN. Was a Just Society, he remembers thinking then, and thinks now, any more improbable than a society which runs on a diet of 'stories' about plagues in India and wars in Africa and serial killers in Idaho? To the repeated accompaniment of a ditty sung by an animated cartoon cash register which tells us that 'Jingle bells mean Christmas sells'?

Well, yes, the answer was that it was. The cash register sings the true tune.

David lies awake in bed, as Gogo lies asleep beside him. (Benjamin too is awake, although David hopes he sleeps.) David mourns the lost trust of Daniel and Patsy Palmer, of Rosemary and Nathan Herz. David mourns the death of hope. He has been forced to indict himself, and now all his family know of his failure and his folly.

He had meant no harm by speaking to Frieda of Eagle Valley, where the vast endangered harpy-eagles breed. Whatever had possessed him, to turn the loose cannon of Frieda Haxby's powerful will towards the Just, towards the D'Angers, towards Eagle Valley? Had he been boasting of his heritage, as she had boasted her mystic links with the Swansberg Stone, with Queen Christina of Sweden? What tosh, what junk! Yes, he must have spoken of Eagle Valley, or she would not have been able to mention it in her Ur-will. Does it really exist, out of family mythology? David has never been there, nor has any other living D'Anger. The D'Angers are scattered round the globein Africa, Canada, Australia, India. They have peopled the world, but none of them has ever dared to visit the interior.

So twice Jive miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills...