The Witch Of Exmoor Part 13

There is a photograph of Benjamin as a baby, and postcards showing a view of Stockholm, a painting of a death ship with black sails, Napoleon on a beach in a red sunset, a harbour at Tenerife.

Emily had not spent much time on these leavings and jottings, for she knew the important material would be in the computer.

Emily had been surprised to find that Frieda Haxby was on E-Mail. And her family had not even known she was on the telephone. Emily had accessed her E-Mail correspondence without much difficulty, for Frieda's instructions to herself had been easy to follow. For the month before her death, Frieda had been communicating with scholars in Cambridge, in Viborg, in Bellagio, in Uppsala, in Mannheim, in Sofia. In the bin Emily found letters about the Swansberg Stone, about Descartes, about Grotius, about Beowulf. Frieda had been wired, formidably wired. Her mind like a lighthouse, her mind like a beacon.

And Emily has found Frieda's memoirs. She has found various accounts of Frieda's childhood, some of them contradictory, and now she is searching for the story of her Great Aunt Everhilda's death. Emily Palmer's hair glints red-gold in the lamplight. Wrapped in her plaid rug, she is an Iron Age maiden, safe in her hillfort: a Highland la.s.s, the last of her race. She is plugged in, across the millennia.

Frieda writes: 'Now Will Paine has finally been dislodged, I'm going to have one more attempt at writing about Hilda's death. And if I can't do it this time, I give up, and I'D go back to playing patience. Or maybe I'll go back to town, for the winter. Why not, after all? I don't have to stay here, do I?

'I can't remember how long ago it was that I realized that Hilda had forced me and Andrew together. She need never have introduced us. But she threw us together. Night after night, in the black-out, when she was on night-shift. I thought I was outwitting her by making up to him, but she was outwitting me. She'd plotted it all. She wanted me to incriminate myself. Remember, I was only sixteen. And the war made people s.e.xually voracious. We didn't want to die before we'd done It. I remember talking about it endlessly at school. And who else was I going to do it with but Andrew? I thought I was stealing him from her, but really she procured me for him. Did she know what she was doing? I don't know. But that's what happened. Andrew seduced me, one night in that room in her digs in Wolverton, in her bed. Or I seduced him. I wanted to prove something. I wanted to prove I wasn't just the clever one. I was sick of being the clever dull one. And I wanted It. I suppose I must have wanted Andrew, though I can't remember what it felt like to want him. Because then I wanted to get rid of him. But by then I was married.

'And to think that for all those years Andrew and Hilda were carrying on behind my back, and that I suspected nothing. Nothing. I swear to G.o.d that until those last weeks I had no idea that they ever saw one another, except under my roof. I must have been pig stupid. I must have been bat blind, worm blind. I can't tell you how I hate, even now, at my age, to admit how much I hated to look ridiculous. I was so proud. And they had made such a fool of me. The;/ had deceived me, and I'd been too busy, too indifferent, too stupid to notice. When other people tell you stories like this you don't believe them. And maybe it's not true that they were carrying on all that time. Maybe it was an on-and-off affair. All those years of on-and-off.

'And to think that I thought my s.e.xual life was over. Because that's the other strange thing. While Hilda was alive, I never even thou ght of being unfaithful to Andrew, although he was such a disappointment, and I was so frustrated. Because, let's face it, he was no good in bed at all, although he wanted it. I had to do all the work. Why did I persist, through three children? Pride, again. I had to prove I could. Those three children of mine are all his, in case anyone ever questions it. Well, you can tell they are from looking at them. And Hilda's baby was his too, if looks are anything to go by. So despite all he must have had a high sperm count. People did, in those days. Even queers like Andrew.

'Hilda's death released me, and I knew it had the moment I saw her. It freed me from her, it freed me from Andrew. So I should be grateful to her for doing herself in. Maybe I am. It pulled the veil from my eyes. Was that what she intended? No, I don't think so. Or not in that sense, anyway. She wanted to hurt me. She wanted to blind me. But my eyes adjusted, and here I am, and she is more than thirty years dead.

'I said I'd try to write about her death, and so I will. I don't know if I can put it in my memoir.

'When Andrew and I were married and living in Romley, when I was slogging my guts out teaching and lecturing and working on Matriarchy and the Iron Works, and getting myself pregnant, and falling asleep upright like a workhorse at the bus stop, Hilda used to come and see us from time to time. The pretence was that we were friends again, but we knew we didn't trust one another an inch. And I used to put on a good front with Andrew, making him put his best foot forward, boasting about his prospects, hiding his drinking, laughing off his drinking. Anyway, I didn't give a d.a.m.n about his drinking. Hilda was drifting from job to job, she didn't seem to stick at anything. She was jealous of my success, or so I imagined. At last I'd got the upper hand, I'd got a career and a man and three children. I wasn't going to show her that I hated it, that I was empty with dissatisfaction. I'm amazed now I had the energy to feel empty. You'd have thought I wouldn't have had time. But I knew I'd been cheated. I'd cheated myself.

'I used to nag at her for not going to see Ma. I tried to make out that she'd nothing better to do than to go and see Ma. No wonder she hated me. But then she'd always hated me. Since the day I was born.

'I used to wonder why she'd never got married. She, the pretty one. With her which-twin-is-the-Toni permanent waves.

'Then she went off to Rotterdam, to work for a shipping company. Or that's what she said. She'd had such a stupid succession of jobs, like so many women after the war. Genteel jobs, ladies' jobs, though we were no ladies. Tea-shops, photographer's receptionist, the lighting department at Selfridges, answering the telephone at the Halifax Building Society. How could she have gone back into all that, when she'd had some kind of proper job at Bletchley Park? Not that I ever found out what she did there. Official Secrets, she wouldn't say. But they must have trained her to do something, after she was called up. Maybe that's how it was, in those days. The men came back from the war and the women were put out of work. Well, I of all people know that's how it was, because that's what I was working on at the time with my LSE grant, but you don't expect your own sister to behave like a statistic. I thought she was smarter than that.

'So off she went, out of sight, out of mind. That must have been just after I'd had Rosemary. There was still rationing, I think. Fair deals for all. Sweet coupons. It was a mistake, having three children. It was a mistake having any. I can't think why I did. I never really meant to. They just happened. I wouldn't have called myself the maternal type. In fact I know I wasn't. They were a problem. Think what I might have been, might have done, if I hadn't been burdened. It's a mystery. No use my complaining about Hilda not knowing what she was doing when I didn't know what I was doing myself. I suppose if I hadn't had them I'd always have wondered what it would have been like if I had. But I never thought motherhood was all it was cracked up to be. Daniel was a hideous baby. Dark red and blue. I remember looking at him and thinking, "What is that?" Grace wasn't much better. Rosemary was the only reasonably pretty one, and look what she turned into.'

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

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

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

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

'She'd been living here for months, it turned out. More or less round the corner. I could have got there sooner if I'd recognized the address sooner; if I'd taken a cab, if I hadn't had to find someone to leave with my own lot. But at the inquest they said she'd have been dead anyway. She'd given herself plenty of time, before summoning me. She knew what she was doing. They were quite kind to me at the inquest. The wronged wife. n.o.body seemed to blame me.

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

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

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

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

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

Here ended MEM9.

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

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

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

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

Emily settled herself down on a broken-down settee, in the big room downstairs, and arranged the blow heater so that it blew warmly right on her. She wrapped herself up in Grandma Frieda's duvet. She hadn't fancied Grandma Frieda's bed at all, nor her bedroom. Both had been unhygienic. Almost worse than the tale of Hilda's death had been the sight of an encrusted china chamber-pot right under Grandma's bed. And in the wardrobe there had been another two chamber pots, luckily empty. How odd of Grandma to have wired herself up to E-Mail and for all Emily knew the Internet, and yet to have disdained the flush lavatory. How could anyone in the late twentieth century choose to use a pot? (Emily Palmer was too young to imagine a weak bladder on a cold night.) Emily snuggled down. The duvet was clammy, and she felt a bit sneezy. She'd put in a few hours' snooze and then she'd think it all over. She knew she ought to have rung the hotel. She ought to have rung home. Where the h.e.l.l had she left the phone? Was it still in the car? She dozed, then fell into deep sleep. The heater whirred on, at young Benjamin D'Anger's putative expense. The bird sang in the ash tree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hind trembles with terror, and Emily is exultant with indignation. She is fearless. As some kind of calm obtains amongst the huntsmen, Emily opens the window and leans out.

'What are you doing?' she demands, in a voice as firm and as clear as a bell. Her hair flames with its own light, and those who were to tell the tale swore that she appeared as an avenging angel. Terror now fills the huntsmen, for who is this maiden, what is she doing here, and where is their quarry? 'Away with you!' cries Emily. 'This is my grandmother's property!'

The scene is majestic, ridiculous. The hounds are subdued, and the Master of the Staghounds approaches to offer a gallant apology. He touches his hat with his whip, he bows like a gentleman. But still he wants his deer. The house and the lawn may belong to her and her grandmother, but the hind belongs to him.

Emily cannot believe her ears. The scene descends into bathos. She turns into a fishwife.

'Are you suggesting I let this poor creature out to those murdering monsters?' she yells. 'You must be mad! I'll have you all for trespa.s.s! And get those dogs off my roof!'

For two of the hounds in their excitement have taken the short cut, and jumped from the path above on to the guttering: now they perch nervously, not sure how they got there or how to get off again.

'Get off, get away, get off!' repeats and exhorts Emily. 'You have no right to come here, and I grant the beast sanctuary!'

She is worried about what the beast is up to, behind her: she has heard the crashing of gla.s.s, but dare not look round to examine the damage. She must confront these intruders until they sound the retreat. She knows nothing of stag hunting, she knows neither its rules nor its seasons; she does not know that at this season of the year the hunted deer will be a female and therefore fortunately unantlered. But she does know that she must stand her ground. That is the role that has been given to her, and she will not betray it. She is the heroine of the chase, the protectress of the deer at bay. It is a fine role, and one she knows she looks good in: nevertheless she is surprised when a chap in helmet, lifted goggles and leathers drives his motorbike on to the lawn and into the middle of the melee and starts to take her photograph. The gra.s.s is a sea of mud by now, but then one couldn't have said it was very well kept in the first place. Can the chap on the motorbike be a friend and an ally? Is he, by any happy chance, a hunt saboteur?

Not quite, it proves, but he is good enough for her purposes. He is a press photographer, and he has been following the stag hounds for an article about the League Against Cruel Sports. He cannot believe his luck. This will be the picture of the decade, of the century. It will be reproduced until there are no more hunts and no more hinds and no more hunted, until the moors and woodland are no more. Emily and the hind have made his fortune. He snaps and snaps, as Emily stands there in the window, until he realizes that other cameras are beginning to emerge from the leaf.a.ge, from the woodwork; hunt followers, even hunters, appear to be equipped with all kinds of photographic apparatus, and the scene is transformed from panic and chaos into a photo-opportunity, as lights flash, lenses dilate, t.i.ts are pressed, dogs whine, horses stamp and snort. n.o.body wants to miss out, but our professional photographer is not keen to share his prize, and also wakes up to the fact that he badly needs a shot of the deer indoors as well as a shot (which he hopes to G.o.d he has got) of it leaping in panic over the window-sill. So he runs forward and rushes across the mangled gra.s.s and the one-time herbaceous borders and yells at Emily: 'Let me in! Let me in!'

Emily hesitates, takes in the features of his face, likes what she sees, and opens a pane. He scrambles over, less elegantly than the hind, which is cowering at the other end of the room immobile with shock.

'Western Press,' says the young man, who is almost as young as Emily herself.

'Emily Palmer,' says Emily, dazed.

They gaze at one another, astonished. The young man lifts his camera at her, lets it fall. He is open, eager, unwary. He has learnt no guile. Is he, perhaps, the one?

'Sorry,' he says, apologizing for his professional reflex.

'That's OK,' says Emily. She is panting slightly, with excitement. Her nostrils are dilated, her colour high, her eyes brilliant.

'Are you all right?' asks the young man.

'I'm all right,' says Emily. 'But I don't know about him.'

She indicates the trembling beast, at which she dares not look: she is afraid it is damaged, injured, will have to be put down.

'Hi'r,' says the young man. it's a hind.'

The manner in which he says this convinces Emily that she has found a friend, and she bursts into tears of shock and relief.

'A hind?' she weeps. 'Do they chase hinds?'

'You bet they do. Hinds in calf, hinds with calf. In December they only chase hinds.'

'Is she all right?' asks Emily.

'I'll have a look,' says the young man. 'Do you mind if I take a pic while I do it?'

Emily is busy shutting and bolting the windows against the milling confusion of the thwarted throng. The young man kneels gently by the frightened animal, speaks to her quietly, then flashes at her. The beast jerks in alarm, then quivers into stillness.

'Don't do that,' says Emily.

'Sorry,' says the young man.

The hind seems to be in one piece, but they agree that they will have to keep her indoors until the crowd has gone. Emily says she is afraid the poor thing will die of fright, but the young man says he thinks she will recover. What next? Shall Emily go out and parley?

'We'll have to get rid of them,' says Emily. 'Can't I tell them just to get off my property?'

'Not as easy as all that,' says the young man, beginning to look around him with interest, taking in not only the beautiful maiden but also the bizarre decor of skulls and bones of the house she inhabits. 'The horses can get out, but there's been an accident in the drive. An Isuzu's gone over the edge and a lot of other stuff is stuck behi nd it. It's a scene up there, I can tell you. It'll take hours to clear.'

Emily is beginning to calm down, and the animal too seems less distressed. Emily is delighted to hear that the hunt followers have plunged themselves into a muddy impa.s.se, and cross-questions her new friend about how it happened. He a.s.sures her there is considerable damage to the drive. 'Somebody will pay for that!' declares Emily, glaring angrily through the window at the crowd. She has triumphed over the hunt in every way: it has been utterly routed and wrongfooted. May all its Land Rovers crash after Frieda Haxby into the sea!

The young man (who has declared himself to be Jim from Bristol) allows her to think that he shares her anti-hunt feelings, which he now does, although he had set out on the day's chase as a neutral observer. He offers to go out and negotiate with the Master of the Staghounds, and, if Emily will permit him, on his return to take some more pictures. Emily a.s.sures him that she can deal with the Master herself, and climbs over the window-sill to do so, leaving Jim in charge of the hind. She confronts them all, boldly. She tells them roundly that they are trespa.s.sing, that she gathers they have blocked her drive, and that she is about to ring the police. It is no good their telling her that they thought the house was uninhabited. That is no excuse. They had better get out of her grounds as quickly as they can. And to whom should she send the bill for damage to property?

The undifferentiated ma.s.s of black-jacketed, white-stocked, fawn-breeched, red-nosed, hair-netted, khaki-jacketed, black-booted folk begins to mumble, thin, retreat. Emily tosses her golden mane and scrambles back over her window-sill.

Jim says it would be better to ring a national paper than the police. He wants to sell the story, and so should she. They compromise: they will ring the press, and the police, and a vet, and Emily will make them both a cup of coffee.

It takes three hours to clear the drive, and two days for Emily to get back to Wiltshire with the spoils of Ashcombe. By then she has become a small-scale national heroine, for Jim's pictures have come out uncannily well. He had been following the hunt since the moment the hounds left their kennels, and he has a whole portfolio covering the meet outside the Royal Oak at Moulton, the pursuit over the moor, the lemming leap down the hillside, the overturned Isuzu, the gathering on the lawn, the damsel with upstretched arms at the window, the confrontation of the damsel and the Master. And indoors, he has portrait after portrait of Emily Palmer and of the shy creature she has saved. The hind had not been persuaded to lie down with her head in Emily's lap, as she had continued to cower behind the sofa amidst the debris of skulls and gla.s.s; eventually she had been rescued by a vet from Lynton and an Exmoor Ranger who had managed to coax her into a van, and had promised to release her with the herd. But we were able to see Emily leaning over the back of the sofa, fruitlessly extending an apple; Emily attempting to pat the trembling head; and the delicate head itself, with its lucent, long-lashed, harmless female eyes.

The vet was of the opinion that she had calved within the last three months. The calf, he optimistically a.s.sured Emily, would be running with the herd. He did not tell Emily that the hind was probably suffering from myopathy, leading to excess lactic acid and kidney failure, and might well be pregnant again. His heart and local loyalties were with the hunt, despite the pathos and drama of the brave, lone and desperate flight. He would leave the dirt to the League Against Cruel Sports. They would make a mountain out of it, he guessed.

They would, they did, and they do, they will.

Emily does not know what to make of it all. She quite forgets Grandma Frieda in the flurry of her nine-day-wonder notoriety. She is not used to being interviewed, but keeps her cool remarkably well, as a lawyer's daughter should, and indeed the press does itself credit in some of its descriptions of the event. The connection with Frieda Haxby's disappearance is not missed, and for the second time in two months remote Ashcombe is in the news. A place of mystery and drama, of legends in the making. There is a particularly stirring piece in one of the quality Sundays by a columnist who had happily been reared in the neighbourhood and who knew all its stories: he retold the old tale of the n.o.ble huntsman who had in ancient times pursued a hind across the brow of the moor, up Countisbury Hill, and down through the thickets of the steep hillside towards the sea. At the perilous spot now known as Hindspring Point the hind had paused, glanced backwards at her lone pursuerfor all save the n.o.ble knight had fallen back in the chaseand then with three mighty leaps had bounded down the cliff into the sea. There, legend has it, she swam away to the west, across the channel, and out of sight. The penitent knight had marked her tracks, and at each set of the hoofmarks of the hunted beast had planted a stonethree stones which may be seen to this day. They commemorate her valour.

And what will Emily Palmer raise as monument to the hind which sought sanctuary in her arms? To her grandmother who fell from this cliff?

Emily Palmer is not sure what she thinks about hinds and hunting, about blood sports and cruelty and conservation. She does not tell the gentlemen of the press that for perhaps two years of her life her greatest desire had been to hunt with the Bessborough Foxhounds, and that for two years she and her friend Sally Partington had talked ponies, dreamt ponies, read about ponies, collected rosettes, studied form, and longed to leap over hedges and ditches and smear themselves with the blood of the stump of the severed brush of the red beast. Their bedrooms had been shrines to the show-ring and the stable, and they themselves had smelt of straw and bran and oatcake and manure. How Simon had sneered, how Daniel and Patsy had yawned! And then all this pa.s.sion had pa.s.sed away, and both Emily and Sally had been filled with a transitional shame. Yet the shame, Emily begins to guess now, and will believe later, attached as much to her feelings for Sally Partington as to the blood l.u.s.t of the hunt.

Sally Partington had graduated from ponies and the c.l.i.toral o.r.g.a.s.m to unsuccessful attempts at the v.a.g.i.n.al o.r.g.a.s.m with Simon Palmer. Emily Palmer had given up the lot, had deliberately forgotten and expunged the lot. And now everybody seems to be asking her what she thinks about horses and hunting. She answers very coolly, and gives nothing away. She insists that she is neither saboteur nor fanatic.

The field is full of ironies. Some of the arguments of the anti-league strike her as unconvincing, and some of its supporters as insupportable: a few of the hunters and hunt followers seem quite nice. (The chivalrous owner of the crashed Isuzu writes her a charming apology and asks her round for tea.) What is one to do? Does one have to have an opinion?

Animals have no opinions. Animals have no sense of irony. They leap, they run, they tremble.

Emily the heroine is perplexed. She knows the hind had brought her a message, but what was it? And where is the poor creature now? Did she die from the shock? Did her calf die? Perhaps she should advise Benjamin to turn Ashcombe into a bird sanctuary, a deer sanctuary. As human habitation, it is doomed. Those who stay there must stick or leap.

Four roods the hart of legend leaped to Hartleap Well, four roods the hind of legend to the sea, and four roods Frieda Haxby fell to her death. The story of Hartleap Well is told by Wordsworth, and it is set in Yorkshire, but many other counties have such legends. (Lincolnshire has one about a blind horse, and it is commemorated at Bayard's Leap, near Sleaford; Frieda, as we have seen, had been taken to see the giant horseshoes by her father. Brewer says the horseman was Rinaldo, but the locals say he was called Black Jim.) A rood (or a pole, or a perch) is five and a half yards (or five metres) and in early drafts of his ballad Wordsworth had allowed his hart to leap nine roods, not four; in his unromantic, stampmaster old age he scaled down that leap, but maybe he was wrong to do so. In the genre of legend, all things are possible, and exaggeration bears conviction. It is only in this real world that the mud is heavy and sticks.

Let us liberate Will Paine. Let the bird fly free. Oh, there are many plots that could enmesh and entangle and imprison him, we all know that. The police, the hard men, bad company, the dope, they all lie in wait for Will Paine. Are there any plots that will let him free? Not in this country, that is clear. There is no place for him in the country of his birth. We have sent him a third of the way round the globe already, across the Atlantic billows, but he is not yet safe, he is not yet far enough from us. Can he fly further? With one more bound he may cross the Pacific and reach Sydney. If we send him far away, out of sight and out of mind, as we sent our convicts of old, may he survive and know the good life? We dispatch him now not to hard labour but to the fantasy of a good job with a decent wage. Will they let him in? Will they turn him away at Immigration? He is not very black.

Fly, bird. Fly, cryptic bird. Take thy flight, thy Qantas flight.

Sorrow has come upon the Palmers, the Herzes and the D'Angers. They had seemed to be doing so well. It is hard to say which suffers most. Let us ask first for a reckoning of Nathan Herz, to whom we bear no malice, not the least in the world.

Nathan's end comes suddenly, unpredictably, on a mild night in spring. He has had a good day at the office, and has dined not wisely but too well at one of his favoured restaurants in Soho, with one of his favoured clients. They have been made much of by the patronne, who loves Nathan, and who has urged upon him perhaps one gla.s.s of Armagnac too many. The liquor had rested warmly upon the ravioli aux trompettes des morts, the pieds de pore Sainte-Menehould, the Caprice des Dieux, and Nathan and his friend Baxter, Marketing Controller of a.s.sociated British Unit Plan Trusts, sat long over the filter coffee, exchanging notes on the state of the economy, the old days of their youth, their s.e.x lives, their livers, their loathing of exercise. Nathan and Baxter are old drinking companions, bonded by the bottle, and they share a contempt for the nineties cult of self-regarding health, for the regimes of gyms and jogging and personal aerobic tutors and mineral waters. Why pay good money to run up and down a short flight of stairs to nowhere? They know they are in a minority (which is why the patronne, herself of an older and more indulgent generation, loves them so much) but they are defiant. They admire the Bohemians of earlier days who drank themselves to death. Why do people want to live so long? It is unnatural. What makes them think it's worth it?

Nathan feels on this good night that he has no worries at all. Even when he visits the gents, p.i.s.ses copiously, then has to reach for the wall as he senses a sudden constriction in his chest, he still feels no worry. Conviviality courses through him. He loves the patronne, and kisses her goodnight. He loves Baxter, and they clasp hands and hug one another at the end of Greek Street, as Baxter hails a cab. Even now, Baxter suggests a drinking club, but Nathan declineshe is feeling a little odd down his left arm and elbow, and although the distant, almost disembodied sensation causes him not the slightest anxiety, he thinks perhaps he should be sensible and get himself home. He too hails a cab, and sets off south to the other side of the river.

This proves to be a mistake. He should have stuck with Baxter and the booze.

As the cab crosses the bridge, Nathan asks it to stop, and tells it he'll get out here and walk the last few hundred yards along the river path. This also proves to be a mistake.

He tells himself that he needs a breath of air, that the closeness of the restaurant (which, anachronistically, encouraged smoking) has stifled him. As he tries to count out his money, he finds he is very p.i.s.sed, unaccountably p.i.s.sed, for he cannot tell one banknote from another. In the end he hands over a fistful of paper currency and tells the driver to help himself to the fare, keep a quid, and hand back the rest. The driver does as he is told, for he is a thoroughly decent old-fashioned cabbie, and an Eastender to boot. The driver watches with some concern as Nathan weaves his way towards the steps down to the towpath. That is the last time that anyone admits to seeing Nathan alive.

Nathan is fished out quite promptly the next morning, and the events of his last evening on earth are subjected to close scrutiny, even before it is discovered that he had suffered a mild heart attack. The heart attack might explain his death, but how can it explain why Nathan was standing at the bottom of a cobbled slipway with his feet in the Thames when he toppled over? Does it explain why he left his briefcase placed so neatly on the sixth step of the stone stairs leading down to the beach and the slipway, just above the reach of a high tide? No, it does not. There will have to be an inquest.