The Witch Of Exmoor Part 12

18 Dresden Road

Maida Vale

London NW8

Miss Cohen has also given them a phone number, and the address of the clinic, which is in St John's Wood.

David and Gogo stare at this sc.r.a.p of paper with an unjustifiable degree of faith and expectation. The very name of Lily McNab rea.s.sures them. They thank Gertrude Cohen profusely, and ask if they can ring her a cab. Not at all, she says, quite tardy. She is quite capable of walking to the station. Can David drive her to the station, they ask. Certainly not, she says. Exercise is good for me, she says, and off she marches to Highbury and Islington, on the stick-like and slightly bandy legs that have walked her into Dachau and out of it, that have walked her into the night and out of the night and now will walk her unbowed into the vale.

David does not believe in private medicine. Gogo does not believe in psychoa.n.a.lysis. But they both believe in Lily McNab. They have no choice.

Before we meet Lily McNab, let us return, briefly, to the Herz household by the river. We suspect all is not well with the Herzes. Jessica and Jon are fine, and we don't have to worry about them: let's say that they are lucky in their choice of genes on the Herz side, and although they have inherited the Palmer colouring they have also received a fair amount of natural optimism and gregariousness from their Golders Green gran. They have been only mildly affected by the expurgated news of Benjie's illness, for they had sensed he was growing out of them anyway. It's a pity, but that's how it is. They have not been told about their mother's condition, and they have not guessed that there is anything wrong with her, for they are accustomed to her short temper, her vagaries, her busyness, her exhaustions, her absences. They are enjoying the relaxed reign of a particularly amusing non-live-in paid minder called Chantal, who collects them from school, cooks their suppers, takes them to the movies. Chantal is a laugh. She lets them stay up all hours while she chats on the phone to her boyfriend in Beirut. We can forget about Jess and Jon. As Chantal herself, unmindful of their fate, so often does.

Rosemary demands a little more of our attention, for her situation is more complicated and more developed. Although she feels no physical effects from her medical condition, her mental unease increases, for it is clear that her suspicions have been correct. There is something wrong with her kidneys. Is it serious? The specialist will not commit himself, he hedges his bets. He annoys Rosemary by returning once more to the subject of her ancestry. He seems to wish to insist that she has inherited degenerate kidneys. As Rosemary's mother's kidneys have by now been eaten by the mackerel and the dogfish of the Atlantic, there is no way of inspecting them for clues, and Rosemary is obliged to state quite bluntly that she cannot inform Mr Saunders of the cause of the death of her father, Andrew Palmer. Indeed she cannot confirm that he is dead. And she has no intention of digging around in the family gene cemetery for the kidneys of her grandparents. The Palmers, she bluffs, had been military men, and a lot of them had died of malaria and dysentery and alcohol in India. Smart diseases, positional complaints. The Haxbys had gone in, less smartly, for strokes. He can make of that what he will. It is up to him to sort this out. That is what he is paid for.

Mr Saunders finds her a tricky and unsympathetic customer. He could almost prefer the days when patients were patients. He'd been paid nearly as much, in the good old pre-market days, and he'd been treated with a lot more respect. Respect is worth something. Respect is a positional good.

Rosemary wonders whether to confide her fears to Nathan, as most wives would. But she is not most wives. And Nathan is in unreceptive mood. His position in the firm is embattled, and he is abstracted. He and his team seem quite unable to come up with anything brilliant or new on the Health Marketing Plan. It is all cliche, all pastiche. He wonders whether it would be possible to break out completely, to think the unthinkable, to start marketing not by rea.s.surance and innuendo but by full frontal fear? A Black Campaign? Skeletons, diseased organs, skulls, scare stories? Or what about extending the lottery to spare parts, kidney machines, fertility treatment, hip replacement? He tries this out on Rosemary, who is usually receptive to his darker jokes, but she seems curiously unamused. In vain does he insist that we all know quite well that it's done by lottery anyway, and has been, discreetly, for decades: she's been strongly in favour of the lottery money for the arts, so why should she disapprove of Bangladeshi kidneys by lottery? She makes it clear that she does not wish to continue this conversation. He can't see why she's being so squeamish, and is not in a position to guess that she is wondering if she has been correctly advised that no private insurance on earth would cover the cost of long-term renal dialysis. She has not yet had the courage to inspect the small print of her own policy. And no, she does not agree with Nathan that we will, by the end of the century, solve the health service crisis by introducing legalized euthanasia. Demographically, it's a cert, insists Nathan. It's got to come, so why not go for it now? But Rosemary won't listen, and neither will the punters or the electorate. Purgatorial flames are already big business, argues Nathan. The American way of death. Forest Lawns. Oh, shut up, says Rosemary pettishly, feeling her pulse flutter.

And Nathan himself can't find much consolation in these fantasies. Can he be losing faith in the market?

Nathan loves the lottery, he is a heavy investor in scratch cards and lottery tickets, he doesn't think much of the dull puritanism of Daniel and Patsy Palmer, of David and Gogo D'Anger, who disapprove of the whole d.a.m.n thing. But he doesn't think his number is going to come up. So far he's only made twenty-five quid back, and he's spent hundreds. What he'd said to Daniel, about his pressing need for 20,000, had been less than the truth. He needs more than twenty, he needs a hundred grand. Nathan Herz is in trouble. He has forgotten to charge a client, for a bill of 120,000; a year has pa.s.sed, and now he dare not send in the bill, he dare not own up to his colleagues. He's not been a criminal: just b.l.o.o.d.y stupid. He has been lying awake at nights with worry, listening to the lap of the Thames. He is getting stale. He is making mistakes. He hears whispering behind closed doors. Rosemary thinks she is for the axe, and Nathan is beginning to think he is for the high jump: from being a two-income, high-earning, upwardly mobile family, they are about to become a no-income, on the skids, debt-ridden casualty. Can this be so?

And Nathan is beginning to think he had never been a real achiever. (He is too subtle, too clever, he tries to console himself.) That summer he and Rosemary had been guests on a week's cruise of the Turkish Aegean, invited by the richest of the rich. Fabulous money, unimaginable money. Nathan had been unnerved, unsettled, and so had Rosemary, though she had tried not to show it. They had been invited by Greta and Bob Eagleburger, patrons of the arts, friends of Rosemary's. Greta painted on Sundays, Bob bought. Theirs was the yacht, theirs were the Braques and the Dufys and the Hockneys that hung on the walls of this floating emblem of good taste. For the Eagleburgers had an eye, they had bought well. Bob Eagleburger had an eye for Rosemary, but Nathan could tolerate that: it was the grand luxe that p.i.s.sed him off. Luxe, calme et volupte. Servants, champagnes, diamonds. And a f.u.c.king Turner, a real Turner, in the Circe Lounge. Generous, were the Eagleburgers, to their little crew of sponging impressionable guests: generous, and mean with it, for they sometimes made them sing for their suppers. The rich are like that. They can make demands. The Herzes and the Spensers had sung to their tune. Even Harry Danzig, lord of unnumbered acres of barren Scottish moorland, had jumped at their bidding. Lord Danzig's demeanour was impenetrably civil and servile, as he accepted Eagleburger largesse, as he toiled round ruins and tinkled old dance tunes on the piano and entertained with indiscreet tales of royalty. The Spensers had been less docile: once Nathan had caught a subversive smirk of astonished disbelief on Sandy Spenser's face at the appearance of yet another farfetched miracle of cuisine. But Sandy was a sculptor: he could afford to smirk. The Herzes could not. They had to toe the line.

Nathan Herz knew he would never be in the big league, but he had not realized, until he set sail with the Eagleburgers, that he was a pauper. The rich are different from us. And in the last decade, they have become more and more different. The rich have got richer and richer. Nathan knew he could not afford to keep that yacht afloat for half an hour, for five minutes. Yet until that invitation, until that cruise, he had thought himself to be doing well. His confidence had gone.

Nathan wanders round the perfume department of Selfridges on the Thursday evening that Benjie D'Anger is rescued from the bath. He is looking for a birthday present for his mother, but he is dreaming of the Turner in the Circe Lounge. It had been of a beauty to break the heart. An unfinished oil, of a rocky Mediterranean sh.o.r.e, with caves and a natural arch topped with a brush of trees: in the foreground, on the beach, strayed dimly painted figures, emerging from stone and sand and sea as though from the ancient forms of time itself. And across the blue and emerald water the faint sketched shapes of * antique ghostly ships. Gold, amber, aquamarine.

His mother would not want a Turner, so that's all right. She is the easiest woman in the world to please, and Nathan has always enjoyed buying her gifts, for she is delighted by any small female treatby soaps, salts, sprays, oils, lotions, perfumes. And Nathan loves the cosmetic halls of the large department stores. Selfridges has a grandeur, a dignity that the new out-of-town malls will never achieve. Its Corinthian pillars, its carved cherubs, its bra.s.s plaques, its bronzed marble, its Egyptian sphinx-lions, its pigeon-netting, its lofty lifts, its history. A woman here may be queen for a day, a man may be a prince, a benefactor. He enjoys chatting up the sales girls, as they lean forward with their glowing pellicles and s.e.xy clinical uniforms, fluttering their long false lashes at him, dabbing or squirting fluids on to the back of his hairy wrist. He sniffs the scents of Arabia, the distillations of rose and cat and whale. He has the keenest sense of smell. He is a sensuous man. The perfumes glow gold and blue and amber and crystal in caskets and chalices, in ziggurats and phalluses, in pearls and cubes and apples of clear and cut and bevelled and frosted gla.s.s. Their names are the names of Temptation, Obsession, Possession, Frivolity. This is the apotheosis of presentation, the triumph of form over content. Minimal dabs of exorbitantly expensive cream and jelly reside in elfcups magnified by prisms, enclosed in deceitful phials, emprisoned in false-bottomed boxes. Who wants No Nonsense packaging? The package is the product.

Salesperson Tricia Chang insists that the Principessa Venier is the best of this season's new perfumes. She daubs, Nathan inhales. He cannot really get a proper whiff of the Principessa, he complains, for he is already too bespattered by the newest names from Chanel and Guerlain, from Cabochard and Klein, from Lancome and Armani: would Tricia happen to have a spare clear inch or two of her own personal skin to test it upon? He likes the deep sea-green gla.s.s of the container, the long old-fashioned scent-bottle slim column of it, the under-watery pearl of the stopper. Could she oblige? Honey-skinned Tricia smiles, with her curved mahogany-red lips, and stares at him with widened, skilfully outlined, china-and-white-and-cornflower eyes: then she modestly lowers her lashes, opts for her left wrist, sprays it, extends it across the glittering counter to the gallant frog-like Nathan. Nathan takes her hand, smells it, breathes her in.

The Principessa Venier and Tricia Chang do not smell good to Nathan. They smell of dankness and drains. He inhales again. Has some sinister chemical reaction taken place? The Principessa smells of death in Venice. Nathan looks up sharply, at Tricia's waxy cherished blandly smiling face: she is not mocking him, she has not turned into a deathmask, she has not begun to decay before his eyes. But this, this is Belle's little dead hand he is holding in his. He squeezes it, and breathes again, sorrowfully, the putrid odour of river water. Tricia is now pulling her hand back again, aware that the quality of his grip has changed from flirtation to desperation. This attractive, ugly middle-aged man is in crisis, she can tell, and he relinquishes her member with a sigh of profound sadness, and shakes his head. No, he cannot say he likes the Principessa Venier. Nor would his mother like it. It is too dark for her. He wants something lightersomething more ?he searches for a word. More floral? suggests Tricia, sympathetically. She is used to dealing with incompetent, wordless men. Yes, more floral, agrees Nathan meekly. The spirit has gone out of him, the fun of choice has abandoned him. He lets Tricia choose for him. She selects a short list of three, but cannot recapture his interest. He allows her to sell him a small flagon of Vie en Rose, which reminds him of those overpowering synthetic pink roses in Daniel's garden at the Old Farm; Tricia a.s.sures him that it is very popular with the more traditional older lady. Tricia Chang wraps it in shiny gift wrapping, and seals it, and ribbons it, and teases its ribbon into b.u.t.terfly bows and corkscrew spirals, and encloses it in a gift baglet. She does her very best with the packaging. She feels she has failed this mystery man, this man of moods. When he has gone, she covertly sniffs at her rejected hand. She cannot see that it smells bad. She likes the Principessa. But perfume is a tricky, a personal affair. It is, as she has been told on a course she once attended, as much of an art as science.

Nathan boards a cab and on his way home he broods once more on money. He is rich enough to buy his mother a birthday present fit for a d.u.c.h.ess, but he is not rich enough to be able to buy his way out of trouble. The lights of Oxford Street glitter garishly. Jingle bells, Christmas sells. The taxi, avoiding roadworks, makes for Blackfriars Bridge. On impulse (is that the name of a perfume?) Nathan asks the cab to stop on the far side, on the Surrey bank. He descends, and then he descends. He makes his way down steps to the water's edge. He thinks of Belle.

He walks under the bridge, past a panorama of painted tiles taken from prints of old designs of Blackfriars. He is not thinking of old London. He is thinking of Roberto Calvi, G.o.d's banker, who had hanged himself by a yard of nylon rope from a pile of scaffolding beneath the north side of this bridge in 1982. Or was he murdered by the Pope's henchmen, by members of a Masonic Lodge? Calvi was carrying a crudely forged pa.s.sport, and his pockets had been stuffed with foreign banknotes and ten pounds of stones lifted from the grounds of the City of London School which Jonathan Herz will soon attend. A good old-fashioned revenge tragedy, here by the water's edge, so near the stones of the Rose, so near the thatch of the Globe. Mutatis mutandis. There had been two inquests.

The arches of the bridge curve and soar, the traffic above thunders and rumbles. Road-works are in progress, somewhere up therewhen are they not?and strange lumps of cladding and loose heavy dirty swathes of industrial-weight polythene protrude and dangle and flap in the night air. Grey and black, black and grey, a fine nocturne. They have cleaned this stretch of riverside walk, have tamed and urbanized it, but nevertheless Nathan notes piles of greywhite birds.h.i.t and feathery filth, and a heap of red rags abandoned by a nesting beggar. A browning banana skin lies on top of the red rags. The little heap is eloquenta still life, a dead life. The brave red cries out.

Nathan strides out eastwards along the reclaimed Jubilee pathway, watching the lights dimple and glimmer on the tide. A police boat cruises purposefully downstream, and a little commercial launch advertising advertising buzzes towards him from Southwark. The Bow-belle, The Marchioness. Belle drowned, Frieda Haxby drowned, Robert Maxwell drowned, and Calvi hanged himself where he could dangle in the water.

Nathan Herz, with his glossy oblong gold-corded gift bag and his sober briefcase, stares up at the high brick fortress wall of the power station and at the moon lying drunkenly on her back in the November sky. Swags of cloud are lit silver-blue by the moon's aura. Lottery money will transform this power station into an art gallery, but as yet there are few signs of development. Barbed-wire, weeds, demolition, desolation, solitude.

A flight of steps draws him down to the water's edge. He stands on the margin. The tide is rising. His executive shoes gleam black against the oily black. He listens to the sucking and the sighing. The wash of a midstream wake ripples towards him, but he does not step back from it. It laps upwards, splashes his shoes: it subsides and withdraws. He takes one step down towards it, tempting the next wave, but it does not rise again.

The water sighs, and Nathan sighs, and a seagull cries. Roberto Calvi had been strung up for one and a half thousand million dollars, and brought down the Banco Ambrosiano of Milan. Robert Maxwell had gone under dragging the pensions of thousands in a string of silver bubbles after him. Young Nick Leeson brought down Barings Bank for seven point seven seven seven billions of yen. Nathan Herz is not in their league. He is a small trader. A man of the past, not a man of the future. Or so he thinks, on this sad night.

Now we may return to Lily McNab. You remember the name of Lily McNab, child psychotherapist? We have not yet been introduced. We have several possibilities with Ms McNab. Is she a scholarly grey-haired owl-spectacled Scot with an Edinburgh accent? An imported American from New York? A Belsize Park matron who walks regularly upon the Heath with a small dog? A lipsticked lesbian from Leeds? She could be any of these characters. We had better take care, in our choice of attributes for Ms McNab, for it is a fact that there are fewer than 350 child psychotherapists in the whole of the United Kingdom, and we do not wish to be sued for libel if Lily McNab should fail. (It is a curious fact that the United Kingdom, which indulges in delightful hot-flushed orgies of recrimination and sentimentality whenever a child is conspicuously abused, injured or foully murdered, has refused to finance the long, rigorous and expensive trainings of these 350but that is by the way.) All that we know of Lily McNab, until we are ushered into her presence, is that by some means she has raised the money for this training, and that she must be younger than Gertrude Cohen, who recommended her. But as Gertrude Cohen is in her eighties, that leaves s.p.a.ce for speculation. Lily McNab may be in her sixties. Whoever she is, she has what might be considered a daunting a.s.signment in taking on the D'Angers and their son. But she has been trained, we may a.s.sume, not to be daunted.

We stand on her doorstep in Dresden Road, and locate her doorbell. Already she begins to materialize, for her terraced house is neat, white-painted and well-maintained, and it has windowboxes with flowering plants in them on the upper floors. It appears that she also has lodgers or partners, for there are other names on other bells. This is an expensive district, and smarter than the area where the D'Angers live. Lily McNab cannot be poor. Will she have a receptionist? Will she open the door herself?

Gogo and David stand and wait. They have come together to confront their saviour. United they stand.

Yes, this is Lily McNab who ushers them in. She is tall, bespectacled, large-featured, in her forties, wearing a rust-coloured trouser suit and a cream silk roll-necked sweater. She also wears lipstick. And she is black.

Well, perhaps not black black. More a lightish brown.

David D'Anger hopes that he has not done unto her what has so often been done unto him. But he cannot be sure that he has not.

It will emerge, in the next weeks, that the parents of Lily McNab were Indian Jews from Calcutta. She herself was born in Calcutta but has been educated in Scotland. Her birthname was Gubbay. She is married to a barrister called Jeremy McNab. She has an indefinably hybrid accent when she speaks, and her voice is low and husky.

Is this heritage of any relevance to her profession, to our story, to the fate of Benjamin D'Anger? Has Gertrude Cohen, as David instantly suspects, deliberately matched Benjamin with Mrs McNab? And if so, why? And was it wisely done?

Only time will tell. As Lily McNab explains, as the D'Angers already know, there is no miracle cure. If Benjamin is willing to come to see herand there will be resistance, it is normal for there to be resistancethen she will see him.

The D'Angers drive back to Highbury with hope in their hearts. They have taken action. Surely love and money can save Benjamin.

Will Paine has found himself a job. He has flown east from Jamaica to Trinidad, to cover his tracks, and has been taken on as a cleaner by an American-owned hotel. He has struck lucky. n.o.body seems to want to fuss too much about his papers. He has changed his name, and now calls himself Robert. He answers to his new name smartly, and works hard. He sleeps in a room the size of a broom cupboard, and hides Frieda's money in a sock in his travelling bag. He daren't try to bank it. He's afraid of banks, as his mother was before him. He's changed some of Frieda's money into dollars, and he's spent some of it on airticlcets, but quite a lot of it is still in the very same pounds sterling that had leaped from the cash stations of Exmoor. What if the notes are marked?

Will Paine has found friends to hang out with, to smoke a joint with. One of them is a bellboy and wears a red uniform with gold braid and his name on a metal badge. His name is Marvin. Will also knows Marvin's girl, Glory, who works as a ma.s.seuse and studied alternative medicine at nightschool. These are nice friends for Will Paine. Marvin is political and talks about Black Power and whatever happened to it and why the Caribbean isn't doing as well as it should. Glory is more into New Age mysticism and thinks that all will be well. Will Paine is interested in what both of them have to say. Sometimes he too speaks. He does not tell them about Frieda Haxby, for she is his secret, but he tries to describe David D'Anger from Guyana and Highbury, David D'Anger, parliamentary candidate for a sprawling const.i.tuency in West Yorkshire where Will had once worked in a pasta factory. He attempts, not unsuccessfully, to convey the concept of the Veil of Ignorance. They discuss their own initial positions and whether they would have altered them if they could. They agree that the inst.i.tutions of society favour certain starting places over others, and that these advantages provoke especially deep inequalities. They affect one's initial chances in life, and all subsequent chances. Marvin and Glory believe they have been disadvantaged, and are puzzled by Will Paine's view that he himself has had a good deal of good luck. They are even more puzzled by Will's a.s.sertion that, according to David D'Anger, none would urge that special privileges should be given to those exactly six feet tall or born on a sunny day, or special disadvantages imposed according to the colour of one's skin or the texture of one's hair. As far as they can see, such preferences are being urged, not to say practised, all around them every day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benjie nods. (Odd, thinks Saul, how all conversation with Benjie seems to plunge of its own accord towards suicide and death, but he ploughs on.) 'Sylvia Plath,' says Saul Sinnamary, 'was a great poet. But she couldn't tell a rook from a jackdaw.'

'How do you know?' asks Benjie.

'Because she said so.'

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

The solitary egret walks through the salt marsh.

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

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

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

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

Cate Crowe has no such preoccupations. To her the whole Ashcombe debacle has been an accursed nuisance. An entertaining nuisance, at times, but nevertheless a nuisance. She wants a signature on a contract, she wants a percentage. There is a possibility of serious money here. The film rights of Queen Christina wander in some kind of limbo, and other contracts and tax forms need urgent attention too. Can it be right that a sick sub-teenage boy is to answer for all these decisions? n.o.body seems to know who is responsible for what. And those memoirs that Frieda Haxby was said to be writingwhere are they? The obituaries had hinted at interesting liaisons, at unlikely friendships. Had Frieda written anything saleable before she plunged to her watery grave? Is there a typescript at Ashcombe, or in a safedeposit in Exeter?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HINDSPRING.

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

The last stretch of coast road is of spectacular beauty. The sky above is still dazzling, but over the Bristol Channel below her, to her right, lies a fleece of white cloud, sucked up from the sun from who knows where, from the moorland, from the water. It rolls in innocent bundles. sparkling with light, and she flies above it, marvelling. To her left is the browned moorland, p.r.i.c.ked yellow here and there with gorse, coloured a paler brown with the dried fawn cusps and bells of the heather, glowing with the bronze of bracken: single thorn trees with a haze of red berries lean here and there from the prevailing wind. To her right is this sea above the sea, this strange and soft illusion. She knows that Wales lies out there across the channel, but although visibility seems infinite, she cannot see it. She feels she has created the world afresh. No one has ever seen this world before.

The road unwinds before her and it glitters blue like water, blue like a thin high flowing river, as the tarmac reflects the sky. High carved copper hedges enclose her for a while and sheep graze unmoved by the roadside. A cl.u.s.ter of ponies lift heads to watch her. Will she see deer on the hillside?

She slows, as she begins to look for the turning, for the track where Will Paine had climbed down from the abattoir lorry. They had warned her, her parents, about the steepness of the descent; she goes into bottom gear, which is so severe that the car hardly moves at all. So this was where Grandma Frieda had hidden herself! She crawls slowly, b.u.mping over boulders, avoiding ruts. Either she must get back up in the daylight, or she must spend the night here. Has she the courage to spend the night in a haunted house? Ought she to put herself to such a test?

The door is reluctant to open, for the wood is swollen, but the key has turned easily, and she yanks and yanks until it gives way. The house is less cold than she had expected, and she discovers some overnight off-peak storage heaters that have been left on permanently. So electricity is still connected. She explores the ground floor, opening the door of the well-stacked freezer, admiring the row of gumboots, touching the skull, the dried orange, the packs of playing cards portraying the defunct monarchy of France. She finds the butler's pantry and the wooden animals and the jewel cases. There are large, thin-legged, small-bodied spiders everywhere: she does not much care for them, though she accepts their claims of residence. And when she opens one of the sidedoors on to the courtyard, she finds a toad sitting patiently upon the doorstep, as though waiting to enter. It is one of the strangest sights she has ever seen. It looks up at her, she would swear with a question. Its head on one side, it leans inquisitively towards her: it sits its ground.

'h.e.l.lo,' she says, from some profound instinct of politeness. The toad does not answer, but it takes a small hop forwards. She is charmed by this. 'Come in, come in,' she says to the intelligent beast, and it hops in and on to the stone-flagged corridor. Does it know where it is going? Shall she leave the door open in case it wishes to leave? What are her social obligations to this visitor?

The toad hops along the corridor with gainly, neat, jointed propulsion. It is making for a cellar door, which stands ajar. It turns to look at her, before it disappears around the corner.

Emily is enchanted by this meeting. She is on friendly terms with the animal kingdom, and toads and newts and frogs and water-creatures have always given her delight. Many hours of her childhood she had spent gazing into the fishpond at the Old Farm, or with a jam jar by the chalky water-crowfoot-blossoming brook, which runs through the water meadows. She knows the toad is a friend. Was it also a friend of Frieda's?

Carefully she makes her way up the rickety stairway, to search the upper floors: how glad she is that Simon is not with her! For Simon is as afraid of beasts as she is delighted by them. He holds frogs, toads and snakes in especial horror. She knows he has reptile nightmares. Drug dreams are worse than delirium tremens, she has heard, but why incriminate, why demonize such sweet and mild-mannered fellow beings? Poor Simon, she fears he is lost.

She gazes from the upper floor, over the water. The blanket of clouds has lifted now, and she can see the distant sh.o.r.e. The light is beginning to fade, though it is noticeably brighter here in the west than it would have been at Stonehenge, at Old Sarum. She must be sensible, she must make a quick reconnaissance up here, then get the big car back up the drive and check in at her Country House Hotel with special Four Course Dinner before nightfall. 'Pamper yourself,' the hotel's advertis.e.m.e.nt had urged her, and she looks forward to a night's pampering. She can come back in the morning, she tells herself. She pushes open Frieda's bedroom door.

Emily Palmer never checks into the Blackmoor Court Hotel. She does not answer her mobile telephone. Has she plunged from the cliff, or fallen down the staircase? Has she driven the car into a ditch, or been murdered by a hitch-hiker?

No, she is sitting in one of the upstairs rooms at Ashcombe. It is late at night and her lofty light shines across the waters from the uncurtained windows. She is transfixed. She is mesmerized by Frieda Haxby's computer and its arcane messages.

She had begun to play with it in the afternoon, and now she cannot stop, although the sky is dark and the North Star shines above her. She has found herself coffee in ajar, and everlasting milk in a waxy cardboard carton, and a tin of baked beans, and sweet soft musty biscuits in a plastic box. She has plugged in a small fan heater which blows hot air on to her booted ankles. She has draped an old plaid blanket round her shoulders. She has poured herself a small gla.s.s of Madeira.

Frieda's secrets had been easy to unravel, for Frieda had written herself many messages. The walls of the computer room are covered in messages, attached with drawing pins and tape. Some are in red felt penlines of verse, shopping lists. There are lists of operational instructions for the computerpa.s.swords, key words, names of files and doc.u.ments. There are one or two newspaper cuttings pinned up, over which Emily had paused brieflyan article from Nature about the possibility of life breeding without photosynthesis from basalt in deep water, an obituary of the actor Patrick Fordham, which Frieda had decorated with exclamation marks. There is a translated Icelandic rune, which reads Wealth is the source of discord among kinsmen

And the fire of the sea

And the path of the grave-fish