The Witch Of Exmoor Part 2

Cedric Summerson, who does know, and suspects that she also knows, decides to pretend he has not heard the question. (British Sugar, you may wish to learn, became the British Sugar Corporation in 1936, when Frieda's father, Ernie Haxby, was a young man: it became British Sugar pic in 1982, was then taken over by Beresford International, and in 1991 was swallowed up by a.s.sociated British Foods pic, a thriving conglomerate which also owns Allied Bakeries, Burton's Biscuits, Twinings Tea, Ryvita and Jacksons of Piccadilly. Nathan Herz knows he ought to know this, but he has become confused with the brand names of Tate & Lylewho are they? Are they a compet.i.tor? And aren't they British too?) Getting no answer from either Cedric or Nathan, Frieda continues. 'It would be hard to say, David, wouldn't it, which of our forebears might have expected to do better? If you'd been veiled by ignorance, which society would you have chosen to be born into? Eighteenth-century England or eighteenth-century Guyana? How would you have calculated the odds?'

(Only Gogo picks up the significance of this question, for only goodwife Gogo, at this point, is familiar with its philosophic terminology, with the concept of the Veil. Daniel and Rosemary are later to remember it all too well.) David smiles, demurs, indicates that the conversation is becoming esoteric, is excluding Frieda's other guests. Clearly they have been over this ground before.

'The D'Angers', pursues Frieda, 'once owned plantations. They worked their way up. They owned a valley full of eagles and they exported Demerara. Isn't that right, David?'

'That's how the story went when I was a boy,' says David.

'Sugar and rum and coffee,' teases Frieda. 'Thousands and thousands of pounds of the stuff. While we lived on whalegut and turnip.' Her audience grows restless. All this talk of food does not make them hungry, but it does make them nervous. What is she playing at? Is it a game? They cannot have been asked round simply for a discussion. Surely there will be dinner? They have been asked for a meal, but there is little sign of one, though there is perhaps a faint smell of cooking somewhere in the recesses of the house, a stale and not wholly appetizing odour of, is it, onion? Or is onion waiting in from some pa.s.sing teenager's polystyrene walk-about pack? They cannot have been asked round for a drink, for water is not a drink. Nor could anyone in her right mind ask even her own family to come all the way to the Romley borders just for a drink. Is she, they wonder, in her right mind?

She seems to be, for when she judges that they have suffered enough, she makes a move. 'I'd better go and see to the cooking,' she says, disclaiming any help as she heaves herself stoutly to her sandalled feet. 'No, don't come yet. I'll call you when I'm ready. I've got something really special for you. I've had to go a long way to get this meal together, I can tell you.' She smiles at David, with a horrible favour. 'And don't worry, David, I have remembered that you don't eat meat.'

Daniel later claims that it was at this moment that it flashed across his mind that she had some trick in storecow heels, pigs' trotters, stewed babysomething of the sort. But he did not voice it at the time. Instead they all sat in paralysed discomfort, unable to speak in her absence because of Cedric Summerson's presence. Nathan puffed at his eighth cigarette. What a comfort was nicotine, what a blessing was smoke. David, gallant, game, polite, the gla.s.s of fashion and the mould of form, attempted to engage Patsy in a diversionary chat about the video censorship board on which she sat, but Patsy's response was muted. Yes, she limply agreed, the new technology was a worry, but she still thought people greatly over exaggerated the dangers of ... and her voice almost died away, for she could not be bothered to work out what the dangers of what were...

In that large bow-fronted room overlooking the green, they had spent so many evenings: doing their homework, watching television, squabbling, talking, crying, complaining. It had been the family room. Since their departure into their own lives, Frieda had filled it with more and more books, more and more papers. Tables full of papers were dotted about, box files were heaped in corners. Frieda had spewed her work all over the house. Once there had been lodgers upstairs, but now every room in the house was full of Frieda's junk. She lived alone amongst the unfiled doc.u.mentation of her past. The room had not been decorated in decades, yet in it now nestled uneasily some signs of late-twentieth-century post-industrial lifea fax machine perched on a pile of old copies of the Economist, a photocopier in a dirty white shroud, a cordless telephone crowning a boxed set of the shorter OED. Somewhere upstairs she was alleged to have a computer, but n.o.body had actually seen it.

In the old days, there had been a sewing basket of something called 'Mending' under the window-seat. Frieda had never done much mending, but it had been therea historical relic, a tribute to her rustic Lincolnshire past. Now, in its place, was a wastepaper basket full of what looked like old tights.

They sat, oppressed, and waited meekly for her command. And at last she called them and released them from the terrible game of statues she had forced them to play. She ushered them through to the dining-room, where the faint wafting of unpleasant cooking smells slightly intensified. The table, however, took them by surprise. The old scarred gate-leg familiar of their youth had been covered, exceptionally, with a clotha slightly rust-stained beige linen cloth, embroidered with baskets and garlands of flowers done in not very elegant chain st.i.tcha Lincolnshire heirloom, no doubt, from Grandma's collection. And at each place setting was a whole battery of cutlery, from the old green baize-lined boxHaxby plate, Palmer plate, none of them knew, and they had never seen it in use. There was a wine gla.s.s at each place, and matching side plates from the set which had come out for special occasions, and a dinner plateeach dinner plate covered with a silver cover. Well, not silver, perhaps, on closer glancethey had, perhaps, been bought from a hospital or school dinner charity salebut, with the overall attempt at formality, they gave well enough the impression of those fancy silver-service bell-jars which pretentious restaurants and clubs favoured in the 1980s. A bottle of wine stood in the centre of the table.

'Sit yourselves,' she said.

There was a placement, a label by each plate.

They sat. She sat. They watched her.

Ceremoniously, slowly, with dignity, she raised the lid from her plate. In unison, they imitated her action. Round the table, seven metal covers were lifted. They stared, amazed.

On seven large white gold-rimmed plates reposed what looked like small, shrivelled beefburgers. On the eighth plate, in front of David D'Anger, was a small round display of bright green peas. Nothing more, nothing less.

To laugh, to cry, to eat? They paused. Frieda paused. Never had the etiquette of following one's hostess's lead seemed more relevant.

She pitied them, reprieved them for a moment.

'A gla.s.s of wine?' she asked.

A ripple of relief ran through them, as Daniel leapt up to help, surrept.i.tiously inspected the label, lifted the alas already lifted cork. He poured a little of the dark red into each gla.s.s. Two more bottles stood on the side. (Do they need a poison-tester, or will she drink herself?) Frieda picked up her fork. They picked up their forks. She put hers down again. And so did they.

'Now,' she said in pity, 'I'll tell you what you have before you. And you can eat it if you wish. If not, you may proceed to the next course.'

She rummaged in the large black bag hung from her chair arm, produced a piece of paper, put on her spectacles. She cleared her throat and announced, 'What you have before you are Butler's b.u.mperburgers. And here is a description of what they contain.' She adjusted her spectacles, began to read. 'The makers of Butler's b.u.mperburgers were fined 2,000 after trading standards officials in Somerset found the product contained no meat. Hot Snax of Middleton, West Yorkshire, admitted false labelling of the burgers, which were made of gristle, fat, chicken sc.r.a.ps, and water from cows' heads.'

A silence fell. Gogo recovered first, as she smartly put the cloche back over her plate. 'Lucky you, David,' she said, eyeing his supernaturally green peas.

'I'm not so sure,' said David. 'I'm not so sure at all.' He prodded a pea, pierced it and pointed it in interrogation at Frieda.

Frieda looked approving. 'Clever boy, David,' she said. 'Quite right.'

'But what', asked Daniel, 'can you do to a pea?'

'Sell-by date?' suggested Nathan quickly.

'Clever boy, Nathan,' said Frieda. 'But worse than that, worse than that. These peas were frozen long, long before the concept of sell-by date had been dreamt up. G.o.d knows how old they are, but certainly pre-1978, I've been a.s.sured.'

'Still,' murmured Gogo, 'all the same, I'd rather have the peas than these things. Given the choice.'

'Say it again,' said Nathan, entering with a professional curiosity into the spirit of the occasion. 'Water from the cows' heads, did you say?'

Rosemary left the table and went off to retch in the downstairs cloakroom, and simultaneously Frieda rose to her feet and started to clear the plates, sc.r.a.ping the brown wrinkled matted fibrous discs into a plastic bag. Conversation broke out, gla.s.ses were raised, cries of, 'What's this wine, Frieda? What vintage?' were well fielded by Frieda, as she s.n.a.t.c.hed David's peas from him, but not before he had defiantly, with bravado, eaten at least three. The demonstration was over, and Frieda disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a large dish of macaroni cheese and a bowl of salad. 'Clean plates, I think?' she said, as she took a new pile of the old chipped set from the dresser and began to serve. The macaroni cheese looked delicious. They set about it with grat.i.tude, with cries of appreciation and relief, as they began to ply Frieda with questions about her performancewhom was she testing, and how, and why, and where she had managed to get hold of those beefless burgers, those antique peas? Why had she done this thing to them? Was it, they now dared to ask, an attack upon poor Cedric, upon the government? Had she become a vegetarian? Was she joining an animal rights campaign?

Frieda dished out, sat down, tucked in, refilled gla.s.ses. 'Look,' she said eventually, when she had their calmer attention. 'I wanted to give you all a meal to remember. It's our last supper. Our last supper in this house. I've got rid of it. I'm off.'

Where to, they wanted to know, and she told them. To the sea's edge. To the end of the road. They must come and claim what they wanted, before she got the house-clearance men in. There were still old toys, old school reports, old textbooks from Romley Grammar School upstairs. They must make a date.

The move had been coming up on her for a long time, she said. She had grown to hate London. She had come to hate the human race. What was the point of it? 'I resign,' said Frieda, telling her amber beads as though they were a rosary. 'I leave it all to you. To you, Cedric, and to you, David, I leave the politics. You can divide it equally. That's fair. I leave justice to Daniel, who will surely be made a judge soon. Judges get younger every day. I leave education to Patsy, and the arts to Rosemary, and the free market to Nathan, and the health service to Gogo. That just about covers the lot. I've had enough.'

And they saw that although she now smiled and fed them clean food from a large dish, she had gone mad.

Over puddinga large, unsuspicious nursery apple-crumbleshe elaborated. They had heard the story of how she had tried to get rid of the car? They hadn't even let her get rid of it. She was chained to it. Why bother with cars, with roads, with going from place to place? It had all gone wrong. She would remove herself. Urban life was poisonous. The air was impure, the foodstuffs were contaminated. Madness had fallen on the land and she had caught it. People could no longer tell the good from the bad. You only had to look around to see that they were suffering from a terminal disease. They crowded together to die, like a species intent on extinction. Pallid, shuffling, talking to themselves, crazy. Even when they thought they were having funand she p.r.o.nounced the word 'fun' with impressive venomthey were stoking themselves with misery. She had walked through that dreadful little open air piazza in Covent Garden the other day and she had seen people sitting at tables eating food that was garbage. She had seen mould growing on a slice of wet giant quiche. She had smelt vomit, and had then discovered that what she smelt was not vomit but burger and pizza. People were eating food that smelt of hot vomit (sorry, Rosemary, are you feeling better now?), of regurgitated vomit. Like biblical dogs, they ate. She had pursued the burger story, spotted in a tiny four-line news item in the Independent, and had taken herself to abattoirs in Middleton and Somerset. She had seen the light. And while in Somerset she had bought a castle by the sea. She had walked into an estate agent's and bought it. And there, alone, she would moulder.

Triumphantly, she lit another carcinogenic cigarette.

'And you think', inquired Rosemary, 'that you will find the countryside full of pure, clean-living, ecologically correct people? It isn't, you know. It's full of burgers too. Even fuller of burgers than Covent Garden.'

'That's as may be,' said Frieda. 'There must be bits that are empty still.'

There was no reasoning with her, they could see. Meekly, they drank their coffee and made their farewells.

Outside on the pavement, Daniel Palmer had attempted a word of man-to-man worldly deprecation to Cedric Summerson. After all, the woman was his mother, and Summerson was a minister. A bad mother, and a bad minister, but the courtesies must be observed even in extremis. 'Bit of a Timon's feast, eh?' said Daniel, pressing the little battery of his car alarm. His car winked back at him.

Summerson took it like a man. 'Impressive woman, your mother,' he said, with a not very successful attempt at a twinkle. They shook hands on it.

Summerson walked down the road to his own car. Although he did not know who Timon was, and was never to discover, he knew quite well why he had been summoned. It was her revenge. He hoped the others did not know. He suspected they did not. Clever they might be, but innocent, he guessed. High-minded, ambitious middle-cla.s.s innocents.e.xcept, perhaps, for Nathan. But Nathan had shown no sign of recognition when the words 'Hot Snax' had been mentioned. Nathan had probably never represented any product as downmarket, as obscurely and deviously provided, as cheap, as Hot Snax. Nathan was more a Safeway, a Sainsbury man. The trail was not clear. However had Frieda followed it? She was dangerous, as well as impressive. Just as well that she was about to remove herself from society. Just as well that she would, in a court of law, appear as mad as a meat axe. Her testimony was worthless.

Daniel and Patsy had talked of Frieda's craziness as they drove home that night. So did Rosemary and Nathan. But David talked of social justice, while Gogo drove and listened. Those three peas, he knew, had infected him, as Frieda had intended that they should. He would never expel their message from his system. Like the princess on her twenty mattresses, he would be tormented. He was susceptible. Frieda had known this, and she had chosen to offer him this torment. He would not reject it.

'In his Utopia,' said David relentlessly,as Gogo drove down the b.a.l.l.s Pond Road at midnight, 'More proposed that butchers should be recruited, as a punishment, from the criminal cla.s.ses. You would not expect a good man to become a butcher. Fourier went one further and proposed that all unattractive jobsall jobs that n.o.body in their right mind would do without constraintshould be simply abandoned. Society would readjust, he argued. Readjust and do without. Kendrick goes one further still and argues that with any fair system of job allocation any society would choose to be vegetarian. No more abattoirs, no more chicken gutters, no more beefburgers, no more cows' heads. Bernard Shaw said we could live on pills and air.'

'Shaw was fastidious,' said Gogo. 'Like you. Like, it would seem, the reincarnate Frieda.'

'I suppose', said David, 'that I'll have to go and visit an abattoir. She was pointing at one in my const.i.tuency, I a.s.sume.'

'There's no need to be so compet.i.tive,' said Gogo, although she knew there was.

'It's not as though I can't imagine what's behind the curtain,' said David. 'I know what's there. That's why I don't eat meat anyway.' 'n.o.body was accusing you,' said Gogo.

'I accuse myself,' said David.

'My dear David', said Gogo, 'you should never have left the courts of theory. Now you must enter the dirty world. And what of the sewers, what of the untouchables?'

David put his hand on Gogo's knees. She pressed it. They were set upon a disastrous course, and, like a good wife, a good politician's wife, she would try to stand by her man. He would betray her again and again, not with a call girl or an actress or a pretty PA (though who knows, perhaps with them as well, for with his looks how could he not fall into temptation?)no, he would betray her for Social Justice, that blind blood-boltered maiden.

David D'Anger is haunted by the fair vision of a just society. She smiles at him. Is this possible, you ask, in the late twentieth century? We concede it was possible for men and women to create, even to believe in such images in the pastas late as the nineteenth century these possibilities lingeredbut surely we know better now? We are adult now, and have put away childish things. Dreams survive in academe, at conferences and congresses where students and lecturers and professors still discuss the concept of the fair, the just and the good. But they have no connection with a world of ring-roads and beefburgers, with a world of disease and survival.

Imagine David D'Anger. You say he is an impossibility, and you cannot imagine him, any more than he can imagine the nature of the revolution which would bring about the world he thinks he wishes to construct. But you are wrong. The truth is that you, for David D'Anger, are the impossibility. The present world which we seem to inhabit is an impossibility. He cannot live at ease in it, he cannot believe it is real. He believes that the other world is possible. He has left the abstract world of reason and entered the public forum. He has hope. He has ambition, but he also has hope. Look at him carefully. Look at him at Timon's feast in abandoned Romley, in Romley left to its own decay. Look at him a year and a half later at that more palatable meal in preserved and enduring Hampshire. At Frieda's prompting he has made good use of the intervening time.

At the age of seventeen, in Guyana, at school in distant Georgetown, David D'Anger read Plato and Aristotle. They blew his mind. Into the hinterland of thought he travelled, to Eldorado. Along rivers, past strange birds, carmine, azure, emerald. Mother of Gold, Sc.u.m of Gold. He read Sir Walter Ralegh and dreamt strange dreams. The Guyanese are the chosen people of the Caribbean, and David D'Anger thought himself their chosen son. East and West meet in Guyana, they meet in David D'Anger. Rivers, waterfalls, great iridescent fish. Greeks, Phoenecians, Egyptians. At seventeen he possessed the globe.

To know the good is to choose it. This is what he learnt. This became clear to him as a boy and it is clear to him now. He would push the b.u.t.ton, he would countenance earthquakes. He would rip away the veil from the temple and force us to choose the good. You know such men are dangerous. He knows that an absence of such men is dangerous.

David D'Anger is headstrong and he believes in himself and his agenda. His certainties have survived every success, and he has been successful. If he suffers from folie de grandeur, he has found others who will collude in his folly. Scholar of the year in Georgetown, he was sent to the old country, to study at Oxford. His family, exiled by Burnham, a.s.sembled around him. At Oxford he rose, and he continues to rise. He is courted by inst.i.tutions at home and abroad. Sugar Daddy America and his tin-nippled hard-coiffed Mother Country have both tried to entrap him. Even the many-teated sow of Europe has grunted her overtures. For David D'Anger is a man for whom the time is right. Handsome, clever and black, he is political plausibility personified. His name helps to legitimate many a committee, his presence sanctions many a conference. He can hardly fail to know his worth. Scholarships, fellowships, awards, graces and favours have been dangled before him. Study-centres in grand palazzi on Italian lakes have beckoned him, and so have residencies in distinguished American colleges. (Perhaps there are not yet quite enough clever handsome correct black men to go round?) Even poor Guyana has asked him to return, although she knows she cannot afford him. Choice, whatever Nathan Herz may think, seems to glitter before David with a refracted kaleidoscopic brilliance that would blind a less certain man. But David D'Anger has no intention of being bought or blinded. He thinks he knows where he is going. And if at times there seems to be an ill fit between his grandiose dreams of justice and the bathos of finding himself adopted as a parliamentary candidate for the marginal seat of Middleton in West Yorkshirewell, he tells himself, he is young yet, and uncompromised. He will force a fusion. Everything is going for him. He cannot fail.

Does his wife Gogo believe in him? Probably. It is hard to tell what she thinks. She has not attempted to check his political ambitions, although she knows that the wives of Members of Parliament are not to be envied. She has her own life, her own career. She does not give much away. She seems to approve his position. She reads some of the books he reads, watches some of the programmes on which he appears. She picks up his references, as we have seen. What more is needed? She is English, she does not show emotion. If she loves both her husband and her son, obsessively, fearfully, you would never guess it. She is the most severe, the most Nordic of Frieda's offspring. She and David D'Anger make an unlikely, a striking couple, and they know it. David and Grace, the dark sun and the cold moon. One day, she says, she will travel up-country with him to Eldorado.

In his early days at Oxford, David had been pursued by men, as was to be expected. It was a.s.sumed that he would find it diplomatic to surrender. The Master of Gladwyn College himself, a well-known seducer and corrupter of youth, had courted David, and it was widely rumoured that David had succ.u.mbed, for the old boy's manner remained remarkably indulgent over a period of years. Small, vain, preposterous, b.u.t.ton-eyed, pursy, plump, treble Sir Roy had petted young David: shaking lingering hands one night after a conversazione, he had murmured, 'Such a turn on, dear boy, such a turn on!'alluding, as David took it, to the conjunction of his own smooth dark skin with Sir Roy's pallid cloistral parchment. This had been at the end of David's first term. Three years later, having safely survived such favours, David D'Anger had announced his engagement, and old Sir Roy had graced his wedding to Grace 'Gogo' Palmerindeed he had generously held the wedding celebrations in the grounds of his own Lodge. During the course of the party he had pinched David's arm wistfully and patted his body most intimately: 'Wisely done, my boy, wisely done,' he had squeaked, as he winked and peered with lubricious approval at the austerely suited bride, at the flowing jade-green robes of the bride's stout and eccentric and eminent mother. Had there been some secret pact? Had David D'Anger kissed the a.r.s.e of the establishment? n.o.body knew, or n.o.body would tell.

Fourteen years now have they been married, David and Gogo, and they have kept the secrets of their marriage bed. They present a united front. They have but the one child, and they will never have another. He is the pride of their life, the apple of their eye. He is a genius. He has inherited all the talentand there is muchfrom both sides of his family. He is heir to great expectations.

Frieda Haxby had recognized his exceptional qualities at birth. Well, not quite at birth, for she had been in Canada when he was born, and she had not caught an early flight home to be with him. Benjamin was not her first grandchild, nor she a natural granny. Had Gogo resented the delay? If so, she never showed it. One could accuse Frieda of many failings, but not of preferring her first-born son Daniel to her two daughters. She treated all with equal inconsistencyscattering favours when it suited her, not when it suited the recipient. Until she saw Benjamin. And then things changed. Or so Gogo thought she noted.

Benjamin was six weeks old when Frieda finally made her way to the D'Angers' untidy bas.e.m.e.nt flat in Highbury. Lying in Gogo's arms, he had stared at Frieda, with his large dark long-lashed seducer's eyes, and he had smiled at her, as charmingly as he had smiled at his Guyanese grandmother. And she had smiled at him. 'The divine child,' she said. 'Oh, the divine child.' And Gogo and David had smiled at one another proudly, for they too knew that he was the divine child, he was the darling saviour of the world. They had been amazed by the ferocity of their pa.s.sion for this perfect infant.

And Frieda had reached out her arms and taken the baby, and he had lain there on her bosom in gracious ease, nestling comfortably, tightening his little fingers round her smooth amber beads. She had walked him up and down the room, singing over him, droning, as she had sung intermittently to her own children. An incantation, a strange, rhythmic, tuneless keening. 'Il est ne, le divin enfant, Chantons tous son evenement,' she had spontaneously, inappropriately, blasphemously chanted, as she paced up and down the stripped floorboards, patting the child's round blue coc.o.o.ned elasticated bottom in time to the beat of the song.

Later, she put on her reading gla.s.ses to inspect his face more closely: Benjamin caught at the gold chain from which she suspended them. She read his face, and he read hers. 'Benjamin,' she said to him appraisingly, 'you are the youngest child of Israel, Benjamin. You are the child of War, you are the warrior babe. You are Beltenebros, the Beautiful Obscure.' Who can tell what the child hears? He takes in everything. Has Frieda put a spell upon him, like the wicked G.o.dmother?

Gogo will have no more children, for, with the birth of Benjamin, she suffered a prolapse. She wears a metal ring within her. She tells n.o.body of this, not even her sister or her friends. The ring is her secret. David knows. It keeps her chaste and faithful to David, but does it compel his fidelity to her, or does it release him? She asks no questions, to be told no lies. She does not want to lose David.

David is unfaithful to her with her mother, or so she suspects. And she is right to be suspicious. For years, Frieda has wooed and tempted David. She has sent him notes and postcards, to his college address, to his television address, occasionally to his home address. Now she sends him messages from her castle by the sea. Frieda Haxby knows David's ambitions. She has cast herself as his Lady Macbeth. She knows what tempts him.

LUNCH ON THE LAWN.

The morning after the Aga evening, the Sunday morning, Patsy Palmer rises early, unstacks the dishwasher, lays plates and beakers and jams on the table for breakfast, washes a couple of lettuces, puts a ca.s.serole of beans and bacon in the bottom Aga, feeds the dog and the cats, sweeps up the remains of a mangled rabbit and throws it out among the nasturtiums, waters the plants, and wonders if she is crazy. Why does she do all this? What is she trying to prove? She is off to Meeting in Hartley Bessborough, some ten miles away, to commune with a G.o.d that she suspects does not exist, to ponder her sins which do, to worry about her mother (for she has a mother, the Palmers are not the only family with a mother, though you wouldn't know this if you Listened to them, as she is obliged to do) and to pick up, on her way back, Judge Partington and his wife, who are coming to lunch. (Judge Partington has crashed his car into the back of his own garage and is temporarily off the road.) Patsy yawns, combs her hair, smiles at herself, and eats a slice of toast. She is satisfied with herself and her sins. And she is looking forward to an hour of silence, away from her in-laws. Thank G.o.d none of them is religious. It would be the last straw if any of them said they wanted to come to Meeting with her. (Nathan had accompanied her once, out of curiosity. The silence had nearly driven him mad. He had heaved and breathed in restless misery, listening to the rude noise of his own treacherous guts. Never again, he had moaned, upon release.) Simon and Emily sleep on, as Patsy sets off across the countryside. But David and Daniel are out in the garden, strolling on the lawn, talking men's talk. Gogo and Rosemary watch them from the upstairs-landing window. The Virginia creeper coils its little tender tendrils inwards into the house. The corpse of a small bird lies in the creeper's nestwork, staring up at them from dead eyes and open beak. Gogo and Rosemary do not see it, for they are watching their menfolk. David has hooked his thumbs alertly in his pockets, Daniel's hands are clasped gravely behind his back.

'Daniel's hair's getting very thin,' says Rosemary, after studying him for a few moments.

'So's mine,' says Gogo, patting her headscarf. 'It's the Haxby genes. You seem to have got Palmer hair.'

'Who knows what Palmer hair looks like?' asks Rosemary, and they both laugh.

'Benjie's lucky. David has good hair,' says Rosemary. 'And in the right place too. On top of his head.'

'There are some advantages in marrying a wog,' says Gogo.

David and Daniel are discussing weightier matters than hair loss. Daniel is professing a cultivated ignorance in the face of David's description of a seminar on Cultural Appropriation which is to be held in Calgary in October. David has been invited to attend, and is not sure whether to accept. Daniel has followed with interest David's update of the slow progress of the trade-name dispute on Demerara, which threatens to involve some large agrofood businesses, but the phrase 'Cultural Appropriation' is, he claims, a new one on him. He wrinkles his nose fastidiously, his eyes crinkle into the dryest of dry smiles: like High Court judges who feign innocence of the existence of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, he feigns ignorance of Canada's leading role in the debate on communitarianism and ethnic minorities. Quebec he has heard of and admits to, but he disclaims any knowledge of the native minorities and their anti-Quebecois stance, and as for the notion that a white man cannot write about or represent in court a black or brown man, or vice versawell, it leaves him gobsmacked. 'Gobsmacked,' repeats Daniel delicately. (He has picked up some contemporary phrases from his children, and uses them occasionally, in 'scare quotes', in a manner that he hopes is endearing. It works quite well in court.) 'Are you telling me that a person can only represent or speak for that category of person which he or she happens to be? Isn't that rather restrictive?'

'So some in Calgary will argue, no doubt,' says David. 'Others, not.'

'And what do you think about it?'

'Me personally? Oh, I'm so deep into cultural appropriation that there's no way back for me. No way I can get back to cultural innocence. Yet it must be admitted that it wouldn't be to my advantage to admit this in public or let it be known that I think it. My bread is b.u.t.tered on the other side.' He pauses, continues. 'On the other hand, it's dangerous for me to take the other line to extremes. There's a line that claims that Philip Larkin is a racist b.a.s.t.a.r.d because he didn't notice that there were any coloured folk in Hull. Or at least, even if he did, he didn't bother to put them in his poems.'

'Do people argue that?' asks the faux-naif Daniel.

'Yes, of course they do. It's the new white man's burden. He's not allowed to write or speak as a black man, but he's d.a.m.ned if he doesn't recognize their existence and their otherness. d.a.m.ned if he appropriates, d.a.m.ned if he neglects. It's a fine line.'

'And what's the new black man's burden?'

'Oh, the black man has so many burdens, old and new, that they can't be counted.'

They turn at the right angle of the lawn, by the wall of roses, and continue their patrol along the herbaceous border where the giant spurges cl.u.s.ter.

'As a matter of fact,' says David in parenthesis, 'there aren't all that many coloured people in Hull. About 0.8 per cent, if I remember rightly. About the same as in Stamford or Sleaford or Spalding, in the depths of Lincolnshire. You'd hardly expect Larkin to address his poems to 0.8 per cent of the population, especially the 0.8 per cent that don't read poets like Larkin. Or to write about them, come to that. Would you?'

Daniel ignores this argument, although he spots a loophole in it, and pursues the question of David D'Anger's own position.

'So you think it's more useful for you to present yourself as a black man with a particular voice and const.i.tuency rather than to speak out on behalf of universal human nature, and all the possibilities of cultural a.s.similation and neutrality that you so clearly, with all your talents and blessings, represent?' provokes Daniel.

'Look,' says David. 'I know the dangers. Uncle Tom. White n.i.g.g.e.r. Token black. It's better for me to dissemble a little, to play the communitarian game. Anyway, I half believe it. I am black. Well, I'm Indian Guyanese. Black's out, as a word, these days. I'm not quite sure what's in, for chaps like me. I think I'm supposed to say I'm a man of colour. They'll update me in Calgary. On the whole, I think the more detail, the safer. Guyanese born, Guyanese and British educated, Indian ancestry, mixed religious background, won't eat beef, Anglo-Saxon wife, mixed-race son, representingor hoping to representa West Yorkshire const.i.tuency with a 3.4 per cent Black-Asian vote and several distinct ethnic communities. Sociologist and politician and father of one. With surprisingly poor teeth, in view of my origins and my personal dislike of sugar. That's me.'

'But tell me,' pursues Daniel, 'to what precisely do they object, these critics of cultural appropriation? These women who don't want men taking up feminism, these Innuits who won't hire a Swedish, Canadian or American Jew to fight their corner?'

'If you ask me,' says David, 'it's all to do with funding. Like everything else, it's to do with money. Most cultural funding these days is based on category, not on individual talent. Don't think I kid myself, I know why I've had an easy ride. Once you're in the saddle, it's easy. But there's never enough funding to go round, and that's why Indians and West Indians and Guyanese and Sri Lankans resent it when white men and women impersonate their att.i.tudes and try to write their books for them and adopt their politically correct positions and get their money to go to conferences. The Northern hemisphere is full of Canadians and Danes and Swedes and Germans busy studying postcolonial culture and digging into old colonial archives in order to get themselves on the next aeroplane out of the rain and down south to the tropical sunshine. Sehnsucht nach Sude, that's what Goethe called it. It's a new kind of colonialism. Cultural colonialism. There aren't enough seats at the table, there aren't enough air fares. That's the real problem.'

'But these are the very guys who invented the concept of cultural appropriation, didn't you say? Doesn't it work to their own disadvantage?'

'Oh, no. They're clever, these theorists. They can always invent a new twist to the theory which means they've got to be there themselves, at the next round, preferably in Singapore or Barbados rather than Calgary, to explain it and represent it. On behalf of the benighted disadvantaged tinted folk who haven't yet learnt that it's their duty to reject all representation and represent themselves.'

'Hmm,' says Daniel. 'If you carried one line of this muddle to its logical conclusion, you'd find yourself in a world where you could only vote for yourself. Because only you yourself could speak for the particular bundle of characteristics that you happened quite arbitrarily to be. A solipsistic world.'

'Sometimes I think that's how it really is. But only in my darker moods. In my lighter moods, I pocket the air fare, attend the get-togethers, make friends and influence people. As you observe.'

'You wouldn't ever', says Daniel, stooping to pick up a tiny sc.r.a.p of silver paper from the well-mown lawn, 'think of going back to Guyana?'

This is a dangerous question, even from a friendly brother-in-law on a Sunday morning in Hampshire, and Daniel knows it. So does David. After a long pause, during which they continue their stately promenade, David replies, 'I was brought up to think of Britain as my home, even when we lived in Georgetown. Most of my family's here now. I'm more use here, or I kid myself that I'm more use here. We were kicked out under Burnham, you know.'

'Yes, I know. You were rebels.'

'We were the wrong race and had all the wrong att.i.tudes. And we weren't safe.'

'You feel safe here?'